EPA. Supporters of the Turkish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) shout slogans during a rally against the attacks on their party offices in Istanbul, Turkey, 18 May 2015. The Kurd who’d save Turkey from Erdoğan The HDP, a pro-Kurdish party, poses a challenge to the ruling AKP. But a wave of violent attacks risks setting it back.

ISTANBUL — On Turkish television last summer, a politician in an open-collared shirt performed a song in Kurdish and Turkish, while strumming a classical bağlama lyre. Selahattin Demirtaş, the 42 year-old co-chairman of the left-wing People’s Democratic Party (HDP), was pursuing an unconventional campaign strategy for the presidency.

Demirtaş ran against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who at the time had been Turkey’s prime minister for 11 years, and won just under 10 percent of the vote — a surprise for many Turks for whom the mere idea of a pro-Kurdish candidate, let alone one who sang publicly in Kurdish, seemed unthinkable.

Now Demirtas hopes to pull off an even bigger surprise in next month’s general election — despite dramatic setbacks, including two bomb attacks simultaneously launched Monday on HDP headquarters in the southeastern cities of Mersin and Adana, injuring at least six.

Ahead of the June 7 vote, polls have shown an uptick in support for the HDP, a three-year-old party that has made minority and gender rights a priority, and reached out to younger voters. The latest public surveys show support for the party hovering around 10 percent, the all-important electoral threshold required for all parties to win a stake in the Turkish parliament, more than twice the European norm.

If the HDP passes the 10 percent threshold, which would require about 4.5 million votes, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) will not achieve the majority it needs to directly push through Erdoğan’s controversial plan to introduce a presidential system in Turkey, which would grant him unparalleled executive authority.

While the AKP looks set to win its fourth election with Erdoğan’s very thinly-veiled support, many voters are increasingly disillusioned with the party's 13-year rule. While the HDP’s support for Kurdish rights alienates nationalist Turks, who cannot accept the party’s connection to the outlawed Kurdish separatist group the PKK, in recent months the HDP’s insistence on democratic pluralism and equal rights — not just for Kurds but for all citizens of Turkey – has borne fruit.

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Turkey’s political landscape has long been dominated by conservative and nationalist parties. In something of a first, the HDP has published a pluralistic manifesto and sought to unite the disparate voices that called for change during the Gezi Park protests of June 2013. It has promised to decentralize government and empower the disenfranchised. The candidate list released last month is 49 percent women, together with candidates from the gay and transgender community, along with minorities such as Alevis, Christians, Kurds, Syriacs and Armenians.

“None of us has a single identity, we are all joint representatives of all identities,” Demirtaş said earlier this month in Ankara, appearing alongside party co-chairwoman Figen Yüksekdağ.

There is a more cynical reason for the party’s growing support. If the HDP passes the required 10 percent threshold to enter parliament, the two-thirds outright AKP majority with which parliament could pass such a change unilaterally seems impossible, and the ruling party may even struggle to gain the three-fifths majority needed to call a referendum on the change. As a result, the HDP has found itself in the position of kingmaker, attracting the votes of swing voters who would not naturally back a leftist or “Kurdish” party, but who intend to vote tactically for the HDP in an attempt to thwart Erdoğan’s plans.

The race between Turkish media outlets to influence public opinion has made it difficult to predict the HDP’s performance. A poll published on the opposition news site Bianet in March claimed support for the AKP was at just under 40 percent, with the center-left main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) at just under 30 percent, the right-wing Nationalist Movement’s Party (MHP) at about 18 percent, and the HDP at just over 11 percent. Just a month later, the pro-government paper Sabah had the AKP nearly 8 points higher at 47 percent, CHP at 24 percent, MHP at 13 percent and HDP “unable to pass the 10 percent threshold with 9 percent support.”

“We’re going into an election, not a war.”

Selim Hussein is a member of the Felicity Party, an orthodox Islamic party that won just over one percent of the vote in the 2011 election. Although he acknowledges that his party’s conservative values are closest to those of the AKP, he will be voting for the HDP in June.

“The HDP is a fresh party, without the stained history of the [mainstream] opposition,” Hussein says. “I believe it can achieve change. I do not approve of what Erdoğan is doing anymore — he excludes those who are not like him. The HDP, at least, are trying to speak for everyone — Sunnis, Christians, Alevis, we all deserve a voice."

All parties currently favor lowering the 10 percent electoral threshold except the AKP, whose Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç described it as essential for “political stability.” After the 2002 general election, which was won for the first time by the AKP, only two of the 18 parties that ran passed the 10 percent threshold, and all votes for disbarred parties — corresponding to 46 percent of the electorate — were distributed proportionally among the victors, the AKP and CHP. This vote-distribution rule is of particular relevance this year in the east and south-east of the country, the heartland of HDP support. The only other party that has any significant support there is the AKP, so even if the HDP wins 90 percent of the votes in these districts, if it fails to win over 10 percent nationwide, the AKP will gain all the seats the HDP would have won, dramatically increasing their majority in parliament. The benefit to the CHP and MHP, barely represented in this area, would be negligible.

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The HDP's decision to run official candidates has been hailed by some as a brave choice, by others as an unnecessarily foolish gamble. In recent years, support for pro-Kurdish parties such as the HDP’s predecessor, the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), has hovered between 5 and 8 percent, well short of the threshold. Instead of running as parties, these organizations have fielded independent candidates (subject only to a local 10 percent threshold), who then formed a party-like caucus once in parliament. The HDP, in rejecting this strategy, is going all in by gambling around 35 safe independent seats in the hope of winning substantially more as a true national party.

The HDP faces another risk: even if it gets just over 10 percent, the result could be “tweaked” down, as was alleged to have happened during the municipal elections in March last year, when thousands of ballots went missing during a widespread blackout that the energy minister, Taner Yıldız, blamed on a cat trespassing in a power station. Despite strong support then for the opposition candidate, Mansur Yavaş, and repeated calls for a re-count, the AKP candidate Melih Gökçek retained his 20-year seat as mayor of Ankara with a disputed one percent margin.

Nevertheless, the HDP’s decision to run as a party this year allows its members the opportunity to reach beyond the Kurdish heartland and campaign nationwide, presenting themselves as a viable fourth option to disillusioned voters.

But one obstacle to the party’s political rise has been its association with the Kurdish separatist cause, an association which may yet prove to be its downfall come June. Mistrust increased last year after Demirtaş denounced the government’s failure to help those besieged by ISIS in the Kurdish town of Kobane, and subsequent riots among Kurdish communities across the country left at least 21 people dead. Özgür Erol, a 28-year-old Alevi sales assistant from Okmeydanı, a traditional hub of anti-government protest in Istanbul, will be voting for the mainstream leftist opposition CHP, not HDP, even though he thinks CHP’s leader, Kemal Kiliçdaroğlu, “is not a natural leader.”

“I don’t want Erdoğan, but I won’t vote for Demirtaş,” he said. “I don’t trust him — there is something of Abdullah Öcalan’’ — the imprisoned leader of the PKK, the outlawed separatist group — “in him. They want to form an independent Kurdistan.”

The AKP has used such fears to discredit the HDP in recent months, despite the ruling party’s official commitment to the Kurdish peace process. Last month, Deputy Prime Minister Yalçın Akdoğan claimed that Demirtaş was “under the tutelage of Cemil Bayık”, a senior leader of the PKK, and this month he announced that "it would be super" if the HDP failed to get into parliament. On April 11, a ceasefire between Turkey and the PKK was broken when PKK militants and Turkish troops clashed in Ağrı, in the eastern part of the country. Demirtaş said that the operation had been staged by the government to stoke unease in the run-up to elections, a claim that was strengthened after Turkish army officials failed to corroborate the government’s version of events. Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, meanwhile, accused Demirtaş of “distorting reality."

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While the Ağrı episode may have forced the HDP into a direct war of words with the AKP, Demirtaş has repeatedly emphasized his party’s opposition to polarizing rhetoric, and its trust in the ballot box. He has also brushed off personal attacks, which have included a pro-government newspaper headline accusing him of eating pork for breakfast, and a “mistaken” police raid on his home in Diyarbakır. Most seriously, simultaneous bomb attacks on HDP offices Monday in Adana and Mersin, the latter ahead of a planned rally to be held by Demirtaş, left six injured.

HDP spokesmen have stated that the party has suffered 56 attacks in one month. The latest attacks have provoked speculation that militant Turkish nationalists or Islamists are trying to fuel fears of further violence should the HDP enter parliament, but have also drawn sympathetic attention to the difficulties faced by the HDP. Crowds of HDP supporters marched down the main thoroughfare of Istanbul on Monday protesting the bombings, an indication of the unrest that will likely ensue should the HDP fail to enter parliament in June.

“We’re going into an election, not a war," Demirtaş said at a rally last month. “As they become increasingly panicked, the party in power will try to create tension by beating the war drums. But we will not abandon the democratic race. The young people will smash the 10 percent election threshold into pieces.”

Alev Scott is the author of the book Turkish Awakening and a freelance writer based in Istanbul. Follow her on Twitter @AlevScott.