A female deputy of the Kurdish-dominated Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), Tugba Hezer, is a heated topic of discussion in Turkey these days. She paid a controversial condolence visit to the family of Abdulbaki Somer, the suicide bomber who struck Ankara on Feb. 17 and killed 29 people, most of them military officers. Readers outside Turkey may find this strange, for what is normally debated at length is the attack itself and the organization and reasons behind it.

Senior government officials, led by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, have been lashing out at Hezer for days, triggering efforts to strip HDP lawmakers of their parliamentary immunity.

The media and the main opposition People’s Republican Party have reacted in a similar hard-line fashion. Echoing Erdogan’s statements, pro-government newspapers trumpeted in almost identical headlines Feb. 25 that Hezer was “not a lawmaker but a terrorist,” that “the nation has lost patience” and that action should be taken against the HDP. The pro-government press was not alone. Even columnist Ahmet Hakan, one of the most popular names in the mainstream media who seemed quite sympathetic to the HDP prior to the elections last June, joined the chorus, going as far as to sarcastically call on HDP deputies to become suicide bombers themselves.

Ankara had first blamed the bombing on the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units in an apparent bid to legitimize intervention against the Kurdish region in Syria. Soon, however, the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons (TAK) — a shadowy group that some say is a hard-line splinter of the armed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and others see as a PKK front — claimed the attack. The government nevertheless took the opportunity to attack the HDP, which it has been trying to equate with the PKK ever since the elections. The first opportunity came when the HDP refused to sign a joint parliamentary declaration condemning the bombing. The Justice and Development Party (AKP), however, had to find another pretext when the HDP said it would join the condemnation provided that four bomb attacks blamed on the Islamic State since June were also mentioned.