ASKED how he is feeling these days, Selahattin Demirtas forgoes the pleasantries. “I’m trying to be doing well, given the circumstances,” he says, taking a seat at his office in the Turkish capital, Ankara. Amid unrelenting bloodshed in the Kurdish southeast, Mr Demirtas’s mood has darkened. Only last June, his People’s Democratic Party (HDP) pulled off a major election upset, denying the ruling Justice and Development (AK) party the parliamentary majority it had held for 12 years. Today, the man once hailed as the Kurdish Obama and the saviour of Turkey’s hapless opposition faces spurious terror charges from the government and dwindling support among both Kurds and Turks. If Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, were to call a snap vote, say pollsters, the HDP would probably miss the 10% threshold needed to make it into parliament.

This is largely Mr Erdogan’s doing. He has marched Turks back to the ballot box to reclaim his majority, unleashed mortars and tanks against militants in Kurdish cities, locked the HDP out of the mainstream media and stripped its MPs, including Mr Demirtas, of their parliamentary immunity from prosecution. At least 50 of the group’s 59 MPs face charges of supporting the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK. (They have asked the constitutional court to restore their immunity.) Mr Erdogan has pledged to wipe out the PKK, which Turkey labels a terrorist group but which many Kurds consider a champion of their national cause. Having already left over a thousand dead since last year, the violence now threatens to spiral into a civil war, warns Mr Demirtas.

Yet the HDP also has itself to blame. In urban areas across the southeast, it has ceded ground to militants linked to the PKK. It has also alienated many of its sympathisers in Turkey’s west. In December, amid a diplomatic crisis after Turkey shot down a Russian jet, Mr Demirtas came in for some flak for paying an official visit to Moscow. In February another HDP deputy attended a wake for a PKK suicide bomber who killed 29 people.

In the southeastern city of Diyarbakir, the destruction wrought by months of clashes is easy to see from an aeroplane window. Swathes of what was once a residential neighbourhood are now empty fields. Officials claim that the area, having been rigged with explosives by the insurgents, had to be razed to the ground. Human-rights groups blame disproportionate force by Turkish troops. Many locals are as disappointed with their HDP politicians as they are livid with Mr Erdogan. “They entrusted Kurdish autonomy to young kids with guns,” complains a businessman.

Uncharacteristically for a Turkish politician, Mr Demirtas admits to making mistakes. “People know who destroyed all these towns,” he says, referring to Mr Erdogan, “but it was our duty as a party to protect them.” Mr Demirtas says the HDP will continue to push for a negotiated solution to the Kurdish conflict, now in its fourth decade, but rules out a deal with Mr Erdogan.

None of this bodes well for the southeast. The army has cleared the insurgents from most cities, but deadly blasts rock the region each day. Outside Diyarbakir, a PKK truck packed with explosives killed at least 16 villagers last week. Allegations of atrocities are galvanising young Kurds: in the town of Cizre over 100 people were killed in February while hiding from Turkish forces in basements. (The circumstances are unclear, but many were burnt to death.) Seeing their representatives evicted from parliament “would put people in a position where they can no longer tell the PKK to put down their arms,” says Mehmet Kaya, head of the Tigris Communal Research Centre, a Diyarbakir think-tank. Whatever the HDP’s mistakes over the past year, disenfranchising the millions of Kurds who voted it into office will only make matters worse.