On Oct. 22, Devlet Bahceli, the leader of the far right Turkey’s Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) and a key ally of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, stunned the country by suggesting that Abdullah Ocalan—the leader of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which Ocalan founded in 1978 and that has waged an insurgency against the Turkish state since 1984 and is listed as a terrorist organization by Turkey as well as the United States and the European Union—should be granted parole if he renounces violence and disbands the organization.
Ocalan has been serving a life sentence since 1999 on the prison island of Imrali, located to the south of Istanbul. Bahceli proposed that the leader of the PKK be given the opportunity to make this announcement in an address in the Turkish parliament directed to the pro-Kurdish, left-wing Peoples’ Equality and Democracy (DEM) Party.
The Kurdish political movement has a broad base among Turkey’s Kurds. In the 2023 parliamentary election, the Peoples’ Democracy Party (HDP)—the DEM Party’s predecessor— received just over 46 percent of the votes in the predominantly Kurdish provinces. However, like its earlier incarnations, the pro-Kurdish party largely remains in the shadow of the PKK. Presumably, Bahceli believes that the symbolic effect of Ocalan’s statement would be all the more profound if delivered to the political wing of the Kurdish movement. In that case, the legal obstacles to granting him parole would disappear, Bahceli said.
When the Turkish parliament reconvened on Oct. 1, Bahceli had unexpectedly shook hands with the lawmakers of the pro-Kurdish party. The far-right leader stressed the importance of national unity and brotherhood and said, “We are entering a new era, and when we call for peace in the world, we must also secure peace in our own country.”
By making these statements, Bahceli has assumed a role that is akin to that of South Africa’s F.W. de Klerk in the early 1990s. De Klerk was the president of South Africa from 1989 to 1994 and served as the last leader of the white minority National Party, which ruled the country brutally from 1948 to 1994 and institutionalized the system of apartheid that made nonwhite South Africans second-class citizens. The National Party also fought a series of wars against anti-colonial independence movements and attacked Black-led neighboring states that hosted exiled anti-apartheid leaders.
Yet de Klerk broke the taboos of Afrikaner nationalism by freeing anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela in 1990 and negotiating the transition to democracy.
The MHP also has a history marked by violence. Between 1975 and 1980, MHP activists—who were known alternatively as the Gray Wolves or Idealists —took to assassinating left-wing students, state officials, and intellectuals. In response, some left-wing groups also took up arms. The party’s leader, the former army colonel Alparslan Turkes was arrested when the military took power in a coup 1980, but he was later acquitted.
Turkes then softened his rhetoric, committing himself to nonviolence. The MHP’s transformation continued when Bahceli, an economics professor who was untainted by the party’s violent past, succeeded Turkes upon his death 1997. In 1999, Bahceli joined the government of the leftist Bulent Ecevit, the MHP’s arch-enemy in the 1970s, as deputy prime minister. Bahceli has since then played a key role at critical junctures in Turkey’s politics.
In 2000, Bahceli accepted a moratorium on the execution of Ocalan—who had been sentenced to death after he was captured in Nairobi, Kenya in February 1999 and extradited to Turkey. (The death sentence was commuted to a life imprisonment in 2002.)
In 2002, Bahceli precipitated the fall of Ecevit’s coalition government by calling for the snap election that brought the Islamic conservative Justice and Development Party (AKP) to power; it has since ruled the country for more than 20 years. However, the MHP remained part of the opposition until 2016.
When the AKP government engaged in peace negotiations with Ocalan between 2013 and 2015, Bahceli denounced the peace process, saying that “there is no difference left between the AKP and the PKK.”
At that point, Turkey sought an agreement with the PKK because Ankara feared the effects of the empowerment of the Kurds in northern Syria, where the PKK-affiliated People’s Protection Units (known as the YPG) had established a de facto autonomous region in 2012. But in 2015, the fighting resumed when the PKK sought to subvert government control in Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish southeastern region.
In 2016, when Erdogan’s erstwhile allies—the followers of the Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen—mounted a coup against Erdogan, Bahceli shifted course. The coup failed, but the Turkish state had been deeply fractured, and it was imperative to shore up its power and authority. With this in mind, Bahceli called on Erdogan to make a transition to a presidential system, and in 2018, the AKP and the MHP entered into a formal alliance that was crucial for the AKP.
Indeed, Erdogan owed his reelection in 2018 and 2023 to the support of Bahceli, and the AKP government retains parliamentary majority today thanks to the MHP. In the 2023 parliamentary election, the AKP won 268 seats of 600 seats, and the MHP won 50.
The partnership runs deep: Erdogan’s government has espoused the nationalism of the far right, and MHP officials now populate the state bureaucracy and the judiciary, where they have replaced the Gulenists after the attempted coup.
But the AKP’s dependency on the MHP and hard-line policies has cost the ruling party—which has been in steady electoral decline since 2018—the support of the Kurds, once an important part of the party’s base.
Today, both domestic political considerations and regional developments have compelled Erdogan’s government to reconsider its Kurdish policy. In a statement published on Oct. 22, the DEM Party assessed that “the encirclement of Iran in a ring of war has raised the possibility that the Kurdish people will play a decisive role.”
The pro-Kurdish party seems to believe—correctly—that the specter of ethnic violence is haunting the AKP-MHP regime, and that this is a revolutionary moment. The statement issued by the DEM assembly on Oct. 22 expressed hard-left militancy: “Our party believes that the real solution is to be expected not from the government, but that it will be made possible by organizing the joint struggle of Turkey’s labor and oppressed groups and peoples,” it read.
Bahceli believes that he had to take this initiative to prevent the loss of territory for Turkey, MHP deputy chairman Yasar Yildirim explained at a meeting on Nov. 17.
The republication on Oct. 14 by the pro-PKK daily Yeni Ozgur Politika of an old article by Ocalan, in which the PKK leader enjoins the Kurds to enter into an alliance with the United States and Israel against Turkey, Iran, and Syria, is sure to have confirmed and reinforced Turkish concerns. Indeed, such an alliance has already formed in northern Syria, where the PKK’s affiliates are armed and protected by the United States, to the consternation of Ankara.
And on Nov. 10, new Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said that the Kurdish people “are our natural ally.” Describing the Kurds as victims of Iranian and Turkish oppression, Saar argued that Israel “must reach out and strengthen our ties with them.”
The war and chaos in the Middle East have made the Turkish elite attentive to the need, in the words of Erdogan, to “fortify the home front” by defusing domestic ethnic tensions. But Erdogan could not risk antagonizing Bahceli and nationalist opinion. Neither could he realistically hope to succeed with a new opening to the Kurdish political movement without the sanction of the party that is the principal proponent of Turkish nationalism.
But like South Africa’s de Klerk in the early 1990s, Bahceli also has to contend with radical nationalists who cry treason. In response, Bahceli has exhorted the nationalist opposition to be realistic and finally come to grips with the Kurdish reality. He pointed out during a speech to the parliamentary group of the MHP in early November that keeping Ocalan incarcerated has not prevented the Kurdish voters from reelecting representatives to parliament who share his views.
For decades, the Turkish state refused to acknowledge the existence of the Kurds—claiming that they were ethnically Turkish, banning the Kurdish language, and forbidding other expressions of the Kurdish identity—and sought to assimilate them. The tolerance of ethnic and religious diversity that defined the Ottoman Empire has been anathema to contemporary Turkish nationalists.
But just as de Klerk renounced apartheid, Bahceli now appears to be repudiating Turkish ethnic supremacy. He has started praising Ottoman diversity: “The Ottoman Empire secured peace and security by keeping local cultures and ethnic groups together, and we can accomplish the same by following in their footsteps.”
Bahceli’s claim that the “Turkish nation has never sought assimilation (of others) during its history” is demonstrably false, but is nonetheless remarkable insofar as it rejects the nation-building strategy of Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, who sought to assimilate Kurds and other Muslim, non-Turkish ethnic groups.
The Ataturk cult is an impediment to liberalization. When Turkish Armenian economist Daron Acemoglu, a Nobel laureate in economics this year, recently pointed out that Ataturk concentrated power into his hands when he instead could have built on the pluralistic legacy of the Ottoman Empire, Kemalist nationalists blasted him. A celebrity actor demanded that he “bow respectfully to the savior of the nation.”
Bahceli seems to hope that Ocalan can be Turkey’s interlocutor in the same way that Nelson Mandela was to de Klerk. Responding to Bahceli’s overture, Ocalan—in a message relayed by his nephew, who is also a DEM Party member of the Turkish parliament—said that “if the conditions arise, I possess the theoretical and practical strength to pull this process away from fighting and violence toward a legal and political platform.”
Yet it was immediately clear that such conditions have yet to arise.
On Oct. 23, the day after Bahceli raised the specter of Ocalan’s release, the PKK carried out a terrorist attack, for which the organization claimed responsibility, against a military-industrial complex outside Ankara, killing five civilians.
Bahceli may soon discover that Ocalan does not command authority in the same way Mandela did. However, Mandela was offered a similar conditional release deal in 1985, which he rejected. Ocalan may even be trying to mimic Mandela’s refusal. It wasn’t until after de Klerk freed him in 1990 that the African National Congress agreed to reconsider its commitment to armed struggle and eventually disband uMkhonto weSizwe, its military wing. Mandela refused to negotiate the use of force until political concessions were made, and Ocalan may do the same.
On Nov. 4, the Turkish state showed its teeth when three Kurdish mayors were removed from their offices and charged with abetting “terrorism.” One of them was the octogenarian Ahmet Turk, a veteran of Kurdish politics, who last year for the third time was elected the mayor of the city of Mardin with nearly 60 percent of the votes. Speaking on Nov. 5, Bahceli honored Turk as a “venerable Kurdish notable.” He implored the removed mayors to “patiently await the result of the judicial process.” Given the weight of MHP cadres in the judiciary, this suggests that the removals were not the last word.
Bahceli nonetheless then reiterated his invitation to Ocalan and held out the prospect of a comprehensive solution, adding that “as taboos are broken and people freely express their views, we can with small steps build confidence and advance from one agreement to another.”
De Klerk similarly said in a speech in 2020 that South Africa’s historic achievement of dismantling apartheid between 1990 and 1994 shows “that we can solve even the most intractable problems when we reach out to one another.”
But in South Africa, the geopolitical backdrop—which was as important for de Klerk as it is for Bahceli in Turkey today—was more favorable. The fall of the Berlin Wall three months before Mandela was freed and the general collapse of Soviet support for South Africa’s enemies along its borders meant that, as de Klerk pointed out in the same speech, that South Africa found itself in a position of relative strength that created a window of opportunity for negotiations.
In contrast, Turkey is mindful that the threats against it have increased, and the PKK and the DEM Party are becoming emboldened by the conflagration in the Middle East, believing that the Kurds across the region stand to benefit from the chaos and have little incentive to tame their aspirations.
Bahceli has shattered the taboos of Turkish nationalism. He has persisted in his overture to Ocalan even in the face of Kurdish militancy and terrorism, but it risks turning into a lost opportunity.
The Kurdish movement will only conclude that it is in its best interest to reciprocate Bahceli’s opening and engage in a confidence-building process with the Turkish state if the United States, whose support for the autonomous PKK region in Syria encourages Kurdish intransigence, decides to invest in a peaceful resolution of the Turkish-Kurdish conflict.
It’s in the interest of the United States that Turks and Kurds make common cause in Syria and beyond. The ball is in President-elect Donald Trump’s court.
