DIYARBAKIR, Turkey — Turkey’s Kurds are expected to solidly support presidential contender Kemal Kilicdaroglu in the May 14 polls, a critical factor in the strongest opposition effort yet to end President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s two-decade rule, pollsters say.

Kilicdaroglu, leader of the main opposition People’s Republican Party (CHP) and the joint candidate of the six-party National Alliance, is in a neck-and-neck race with Erdogan, according to opinion polls, with some surveys putting him in the lead.

In tacit support for Kilicdaroglu, the People's Democratic Party (HDP), Turkey’s main pro-Kurdish movement, announced last month it would not field a candidate in the presidential polls as its “historical responsibility against [Erdogan’s] one-man rule.” The announcement was preceded by talks between Kilicdaroglu and HDP leaders, in which both sides called for “a new beginning” to return Turkey to the path of democracy and pledged to discuss and resolve the Kurdish issue in parliament.

In Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish southeast, support for Kilicdaroglu’s presidential bid is likely to be stronger than that for the HDP in the simultaneous parliamentary polls, Roj Girasun, the coordinator of Rawest, a polling company based in Diyarbakir, the largest city of the region, told Al-Monitor.