After the ruling AK Party failed to express regret for his TV station’s damage in the February earthquake, broadcaster Mehmet Dalgic switched allegiance to his main rival.
Dalgic’s growing dissatisfaction with the AKP, which has long enjoyed strong support in the region due to early efforts to strengthen Kurdish rights and the local economy, was the last straw.
Erdogan’s popularity in the southeast and elsewhere is suffering ahead of Sunday’s elections, threatening his prospects of remaining in government.
Analysts say the government’s more nationalist tone has eroded his popularity among Kurds, who make up 20% of the population and are seen as a ‘kingmaker’ in elections.
“Now I say to Turkey that a change is necessary,” Dalgic said as excavators cleaned the collapsed shopping mall in Diyarbakir, the region’s biggest city, where his TV station was located. “The young have no hope, no future.”
Rawest pollsters recorded 76.3% support for opposition presidential candidate Kemal Kilicdaroglu and 20.5% support for Erdogan in Diyarbakir province this week.
Kilicdaroglu’s primary opposition party, the CHP, had limited support in the southeast until he reached out to Kurds and the pro-Kurdish HDP, which controls the region and won 67% of the vote in Diyarbakir in 2018.
THE “KURDISH PROBLEM”
Despite Erdogan’s diminishing popularity in the region, he has followers such as trader Adil Aydin, who blames the CHP for state brutality against Kurds before Erdogan’s AKP came to power.
“From the moment (Erdogan) said, ‘the Kurdish problem is my problem,’ it brought peace in this region,” Aydin said in his cheese shop in the city’s historic center, alluding to Ankara’s attempts to end a decades-long conflict that has left the region scarred.
The militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) started attacking the state in 1984. Almost 40,000 people have been killed in the fighting.
In his election campaign, Erdogan has often indicated links between the PKK and the opposition alliance without providing evidence, evidently intending to incite deep nationalist animosity for the terrorist group.
Erdogan began talks with the PKK over a decade ago. In 2015, the talks fell through, resulting in violent urban unrest in the southeast, particularly near Aydin’s company. Aydin believes the fighting in northern Iraq will end.
Kurds want peace to return. “They want peace,” Aydin said, expressing confidence in the president. “As people say, if anyone can do it, Erdogan can.”
Dalgic recalled how pleased he was when he first heard Erdogan speak two decades ago, and how the AKP was his “salvation.” I sobbed. I was choking. I’d never seen such an inspiring leader with so much fire.”
He would vote for Kilicdaroglu, who is now leading in presidential polls, twenty years later.
THE ERDOGAN CHANGE
Kilicdaroglu is supported by the HDP, the parliament’s third-largest party. Due to a court-ordered prohibition for PKK links, it is running as the insignificant Green Left Party.
Basak Demirtas, Selahattin Demirtas’ wife, released a video this week asking HDP members to vote for the CHP leader.
An HDP parliamentary candidate, Mehmet Emin Aktar, claimed the presidency had changed.
“Erdogan, his language, and manners are very different today from how they were 20 years ago,” Aktar observed, citing the 2015 peace process failure.
Following that, the HDP was subjected to a years-long crackdown, with thousands of party executives and members imprisoned and dozens of lawmakers and elected mayors removed and replaced by unelected state officials.
“This government pressure violates and suppresses all rights, such as freedom of expression and the right to organize and demonstrate,” said Aktar, a former Diyarbakir bar head.
Because of economic hardship and unemployment, first-time voters in Diyarbakir may vote for CHP, an unlikely situation in the past
