Win or lose, Turkey's Kurds will advance in June elections

In a normal democracy, it would be unthinkable for a political party with a projected vote count of some 9% to be left out of parliament. In Turkey, however, it is possible, because the country’s parliamentary electoral threshold, the world’s highest, stands at 10%. The latest debate sparked by the threshold involves the Kurdish-dominated People’s Democracy Party (HDP) and its chances of entering parliament in the June 7 general elections.

Turkey’s Kurdish parties have never managed to reach the 10% mark, but they won parliamentary representation at the polls in 2007 and 2011, when the parties won seats by fielding independents, a method that allowed them to get around the threshold requirement. In 2011, the Peace and Democracy Party, from which the HDP branched off, garnered only 6% of the vote but managed to get 36 candidates into parliament. In 2007, its predecessor, the Democratic Society Party, used the same method to clinch 20 seats, while receiving about 4% of the vote.

The HDP now faces a dilemma stemming from its critical decision to contest the next elections as a party. Running as a party seems to be a final decision, which makes overcoming the 10% barrier a make-or-break situation. Failure to do so would mean that not even a single deputy would represent the Kurdish political movement in parliament.

With 4½ months to go until the elections, various pollsters have estimated the HDP’s vote at about 9%, which shrouds the party’s prospects in uncertainty. Being sidelined from politics might seem like too big a risk for the Kurds to take. The HDP, however, is not the only embodiment of the Kurdish political movement, and parliament is not its only platform for political engagement in Turkey. Moreover, an HDP left outside parliament poses greater risks for Turkey than it does for the Kurdish political movement.