After his party suffered a national defeat to the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) in the March 2024 local elections, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan launched secret talks with imprisoned Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Ocalan. Erdogan's objectives were clear: to shatter the electoral alliance between the CHP and the pro-Kurdish DEM party that had helped propel the opposition to victory, and to harness DEM support for legislative and political maneuvers that would enable him to run for a third presidential term when his second, and final, five-year mandate ends in 2028.

The outreach to the Kurds, made public by Erdogan’s nationalist ally Devlet Bahceli in an extraordinary parliamentary address in October 2024, was presented to a skeptical Turkish public as an effort to establish a “terror-free” Turkey.

This was meant to culminate in a perfect marriage between the security state’s objectives and Erdogan’s personal ambitions, with some benefits thrown in for the Kurds. The PKK would end its more than 40-year armed campaign against the Turkish state, followed by the group’s dissolution. In the process, the thinking goes, the nationalist fury that had contributed to derailing a previous round of peace talks in 2015 would be avoided.

In exchange, amnesty and other forms of legal reprieve would be accorded to Ocalan and eligible fighters. Decades of pressure on elected Kurdish officials and overt expressions of Kurdish identity would cease. The biggest prize of all would be Ankara’s tacit acceptance of the mini statelet formed under partial US protection by the PKK’s Syrian franchise in northeast Syria, which it has long sought to destroy. That prospect is thought to have been instrumental in the PKK’s decision to go along with its revered leader’s orders. On May 12, it announced that it was disarming and disbanding. “The mother is sacrificing herself for the baby” is how Bayar Dosky, an Iraqi Kurdish academic, described the PKK’s move to Al-Monitor at that time.