Why Turkey’s election is a very big deal

Istanbul • On Sunday, Turkey will hold a national election, less than six months after voters delivered the country's first hung parliament since 2002.

The vote takes place in a climate of real tension and polarization. Months of concerted campaigning by Turkey's main political parties have exacerbated the sense of division within the country. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has ruled for 13 years as either prime minister or president, is a man either loved or reviled by his people.

After more than a decade firmly in power, Erdogan's ruling Justice and Development Party, known by the Turkish abbreviation AKP, lost its clear majority in parliament in June elections. The vote was a real blow to Erdogan's aspirations: He had hoped for a super-majority in parliament that would give his party enough of a mandate to rewrite the Turkish constitution and grant the presidency -- a ceremonial and apolitical post that Erdogan has occupied since 2014 -- more executive powers.

Instead, the past few months have seen a worrying unraveling within Turkey, with the economy slumping, the decades-old conflict with Kurdish separatists flaring up, and suspected Islamist militants striking targets within the nation.

Amid this upheaval, opinion polls suggest a similarly inconclusive outcome to the Nov. 1 election. What comes next will have a huge impact not only for Turkey's political future, but a wider region already wracked with instability.

Violence and civil war

On Oct. 10, two bomb blasts ripped through a leftist peace rally in Ankara, the Turkish capital, killing 102 people. It was the worst terror attack in Turkey's modern history. This week, the prosecutor's office in Ankara pinned the blame on Islamic State militants, linking thee explosions to a deadly July bombing of a similar rally in the Turkish border town of Suruc.

But that followed weeks of divisive finger-pointing in the aftermath of the attack. Leftist critics of the government, including members of organizations that participated in the ill-fated gathering, accuse authorities of enabling such terrorism, either through sheer incompetence or tacit support for Islamist forces within the country.

Erdogan, meanwhile, declared that the Ankara bombing was possibly the work of a combined plot of jihadists, Syrian intelligence and the PKK, an outlawed Kurdish militant group that's deemed a terrorist organization by both Turkey and the United States. It's an outlandish theory that holds little water for most analysts, but it reflects Turkey's own political divisions.

The main obstacle to Erdogan's party winning a decisive majority of seats is the Peoples' Democratic Party, or HDP, a left-wing, pro-Kurdish party that surged into parliament in June with the support of a wide spectrum of Turkish secularists, leftists, Kurds and other ethnic minorities. The party's electoral success came at the expense of the AKP, which had earlier relied upon the votes of conservative Kurds.

In recent months, government officials have painted the HDP as a proxy for the PKK -- a charge that carries a certain degree of truth. The HDP emerged from the Kurdish nationalist struggle and some of its members still have relatives "in the mountains," the euphemism often deployed for those in the PKK's ranks.

But the HDP, which espouses peace and a more decentralized Turkish political system, clearly did not want to see the resumption of hostilities between the Turkish state and Kurdish guerrillas in the wake of the June election. According to government figures, more than 150 Turkish security personnel have died in clashes with the PKK; the Turkish military has launched a concerted counter-insurgency campaign, including airstrikes on PKK camps in northern Iraq.

The violence has fanned nationalist flames and spiked anti-Kurdish sentiment in certain parts of Turkey. Erdogan's critics say his rhetoric feeds these tensions.

"⅛Erdogan's⅜ bitterly divisive rhetoric, which frequently employs religious narrative and the demonization of opponents, has cleaved the country in two: those who love him, and those who hate him," writes columnist Sevgi Akarcesme. "Both parties are equally passionate in their convictions, which makes the divide all the more volatile."

The terror attack in Ankara only exposed the widening rift between these two camps. Some leftist activists reported seeing fireworks being set off in parts of the capital on the day of the bombings.

"The official line is that it's a tragedy," says Nihat Ali Ozcan, an analyst at the Economic Policy Research Foundation of Turkey, an Ankara-based think tank. "But behind the door, people will interpret it according to their own ideological positions."