Diyarbakir, Turkey---Turkey's Kurds are hoping the electoral success of the pro-Kurdish People's Democratic Party (HDP) will advance their standing in parliament and spur a stuttering peace process to end decades of violence in the southeast.
Sunday's election saw the HDP win seats in parliament for the first time as a party rather than as a group of independent MPs.
The party passed the 10-percent threshold for parliamentary representation to win 80 seats in the 550-member chamber.
The HDP is expected to use its position to try reinvigorate peace talks between the government and the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), whose insurgency in the Kurdish-dominated southeast has claimed tens of thousands of lives.
The party will also press other Kurdish demands, including education in their Kurdish mother tongue for Kurdish children in state-run schools.
"The election outcome has proved nobody can make a decision about the Kurds without the presence of Kurds," an HDP official, who asked not to be named, told AFP in the Kurdish-majority city of Diyarbakir.
The negotiations with the PKK on ending its insurgency has been one of the cornerstone policies of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
But the talks stumbled in recent months as the election fanned nationalist sentiments and divisions emerged over whether the PKK should disarm before or after a peace deal.
Party officials and analysts say there is still a chance to turn a 2013 ceasefire, which has largely held, into a lasting peace deal.
- 'Saving the Kurdish problem' -
"The HDP's presence in the parliament will help save the Kurdish problem from arms," Vahap Coskun of the Diyarbakir-based Dicle University told AFP.
"We are talking about a party which won votes not only from the Kurdish region but also from all over Turkey," he said.
During the campaign the AKP accused the HDP of being a front for the PKK, which has been designated as a terrorist organisation by Turkey and its Western allies.
But HDP lawmakers dismissed any links with the armed group, while calling for the peace talks to resume.
"There is no link between the HDP and the PKK but it is a fact that many of the party electorate have sympathy for the PKK as they have sons who are either in the mountains or victims of the deadly conflict," Ziya Pir, one of the HDP's new-elected MPs, told AFP at the party headquarters in Diyarbakir.
Nursel Aydogan, another HDP lawmaker, said both the PKK and its jailed leader Abdullah Ocalan had to be accepted as partners for the talks to succeed.
"Nobody in Turkey has patience for fresh chaos or deaths. Peace cannot be sacrificed to political concerns," she said.
AFP
