ELECTION campaigns in Turkey are sometimes exuberant affairs, with the streets decked out with bunting and resounding with jingles. But the mood was mostly subdued as voters prepared to cast their ballots on November 1st.

With every passing day since the previous poll in June, a country long seen as a model of Muslim democracy has grown more polarised. Political feuds and real bloodshed have become horribly intermingled, especially since the reopening in July of conflict between the state and the guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). During the current electoral contest, a pro-Kurdish movement, the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) has denounced its terrible treatment by the ruling Islamist Justice and Development (AK) party. AK is in turn determined to recoup lost ground after losing its parliamentary majority because of the HDP’s unexpectedly high score of 13% in June.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose ceremonial position is supposed to put him above politics, accuses the HDP of being a proxy for the PKK, which the HDP strongly denies. He has urged citizens to “teach the people who get backing from this terrorist organisation the lesson they need”: an implied call to vote for AK, which has dominated Turkey since 2002.

It was Mr Erdogan who rolled the electoral dice a second time after the failure of coalition talks involving the four parties in parliament: AK, the HDP, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), which speaks for Turkey’s once dominant secular tradition and the right-wing jingoists of the National Action Party (MHP). But the HDP says the tables are tilted. They have reported 200 attacks on their offices. Since violence resumed, 22 mayors elected on an HDP ticket have been removed, and another 20 arrested. The authorities have been “creating psychological pressure and making people feel as if they are doing something illegal by attending our gatherings”, says Ayse Acar Basaran, an HDP candidate.

Media access has certainly been skewed. In the first 25 days of October, Mr Erdogan appeared on the state-run TV channel for 29 hours, while coverage of his party ran for 30 hours, says the Supreme Council for Radio and Television. The CHP and MHP were on air for five hours and 70 minutes, respectively, while the pro-Kurdish HDP got a mere 18 minutes.

Apart from crimping its obvious rivals, the government is also cracking down on former friends. On October 28th police wielding water cannon and tear gas burst into a media company and silenced its broadcasts. This was part of a drive against firms linked to Fethullah Gulen, an American-based Islamic preacher who used to back Mr Erdogan but is now a biting critic. It followed the government’s takeover, with a prosecutor’s blessing, of the broadcaster’s parent which also owns newspapers and mining and energy firms. Oddly, this behaviour may not have affected voters’ feelings that much; polls suggest an outcome not much different from last time. But in some parts of the country, the climate is so tense that there are questions over how fair the election will be. Antagonism between Kurds and ethnic Turks is soaring to levels not seen since the 1990s. Whenever television shows the funerals of Turkish soldiers or police killed in clashes with the PKK, anti-Kurdish sentiment surges; and the government seems proud of the fact that it is fighting the Kurds beyond the borders as well as domestically. Ahmet Davutoglu, the prime minister, confirmed on October 26th that Turkish forces had hit Kurdish militias inside Syria, although those forces are the West’s allies against the jihadists of Islamic State (IS). The Turkish government claims to be fighting a two-pronged war against Kurdish forces and IS. It has shown greater zeal in battling the Kurds, but this week it reported several domestic operations against IS. A shootout with suspected IS militants in the south-eastern city of Diyarbakir left two police officers and seven fighters dead. Security forces then said they had arrested 30 people in raids around Konya. The Ankara prosecutor’s office has blamed IS for an explosion in the capital on October 10th that killed 102 peace activists. (The government has made the weird charge that IS and the PKK colluded in the outrage.) Critics from the leftist and pro-Kurdish camp retort that whoever planted the bombs, people in their ideological corner were the main victims—as was the case with a bomb in July in the border town of Suruc, in which more than 30 young people died. There is evidence of a link between the two blasts: one of the perpetrators of the Ankara blast was a brother of a bomber involved in the Suruc one.

Besides violence, voters worry about bread-and-butter issues. AK boasts that the economy has grown a lot since it took power (though it has slowed of late). Turkey’s hopes of joining the European Union rose again this month when Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, vowed to revive entry talks in return for help with refugees.

Erdogan expects compliance To ordinary Turks, whose life is getting harder, AK has promised to raise the minimum wage. It also offers a child bonus for mothers and support for students, young entrepreneurs and newly weds. Mr Davutoglu even made a bizarre pledge to help young people find spouses.