The Bakırhan Interview, the Fifty-Sixth Day of the Framework Law, and the Class Anatomy of a Party from HEP to DEM

The Bakırhan Interview, the Fifty-Sixth Day of the Framework Law, and the Class Anatomy of a Party from HEP to DEM

In Whose Name Will the Title Deed of Peace Be Issued? At the Door: A DEM Party Dossier

Dear Young Comrades,

This morning a long interview that Dilan Temiz held with Tuncer Bakırhan, co-chair of the DEM Party, was published in Evrensel: We expect the first returns to begin before winter. The interview was made at a threshold where the process has completed its second year, Parliament has reopened, and fifty-six days have passed since the framework law was adopted. Inside it there is a disarmament calendar, there is Öcalan's position, there is the return of PKK members, there is a new constitution, there is Demirtaş, there is the argument over Alevis and intellectuals, there is Syria, there is the fund plunder. And there is an open reproach directed at the Turkish left.

This dossier does four jobs at once.

It reads the interview: What was said, what was not said, which sentence shows what, and what does it cover?

It weighs the present state of the process together with what we have written since August: Where do the theses we put forward in our framework-law series stand fifty-six days later?

It reads a party with its whole history: As we did last week in Mass or Class? A Dossier on the Workers' Party of Turkey, it examines with a class eye the tradition running from HEP to DEM; the political paths of the two co-chairs and their stands at Parliament's moments of rupture; why the HDK experience could not be sustained; and the relation the party has built with the other class parties.

It takes a stand: We say that a tradition once founded with the claim of being the united party of all the oppressed of Turkey is today pushing the general demands of the democratic struggle into the background and narrowing its agenda to Öcalan's position and to the release of its own prisoners; that it is missing the basic democratic needs; that it has not even put on the bargaining table the Can Atalay ruling, which is the barest application of the Constitution. This is the thesis of the dossier.

Let us say it at the start: This is not an enemy's criticism. The Kurdish people's demands for equal citizenship, the mother tongue, identity and free politics are unconditionally our demands too. So long as the equal rights of a people are not recognised in a country, the working class of that country cannot be free either; this has been one of the basic lessons of the socialist movement since what Marx wrote on Ireland. The silencing of the guns is a gain, and we stand against every left discourse that belittles it. But comradeship is not silence. To take seriously a party for which millions of a people's labourers have voted, and thousands of whose cadres have spent years in prison, includes criticising it with an open heart.

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SHORT SUMMARY: WHAT ARE WE SAYING?

For those who do not have time for the long reading, we gather the whole of the dossier here. The details and the sources are in the sections ahead.

The door has opened, the threshold is waiting. Bakırhan's main sentence in the interview is this: "The framework law opened the legal door to this; but the opening of the door and people's going inside are not the same thing. Because no one returns to uncertainty." The law was adopted on 10 August with 467 votes; its entry into force depends on the National Security Council (MGK) determining that the organisation's de facto existence has ended and that the weapons have been handed over. The 30 September MGK did not make this determination. The law exists legally, and it does not exist in practice. None of the expectation DEM announced on 18 August, that "four thousand people will be released, and Demirtaş and Yüksekdağ will come out too", has come about.

Three calendars do not hold one another. Ankara says "first, confirmation from the field" (Fidan, 20 September: "concrete steps have not taken place"). Qandil says "first, Öcalan's freedom" (Bayık, mid-September). İmralı says "the gun should no longer be sanctified". DEM, in the middle of this triangle, proposes patience with the warning that "a technical delay should not turn into a political postponement". The diagnosis is from law, the prescription from patience.

The two co-chairs represented two traditions. Tuncer Bakırhan, by a path running from HADEP to the DEHAP chair, from the Siirt mayoralty to a trustee and to prison, represents the core of the national movement. Tülay Hatimoğulları, an Arab Alevi, socialist and feminist politician who came from Samandağ, represented the component of the Turkish left inside the HDP, by a path running from the SYKP co-chair to the founding of the HDK and the HDP. The co-chair system was an instrument for holding these two traditions side by side. Today the voice of the second tradition is almost unheard in the party's political language.

The HDK could not be sustained, because it was never an alliance among equals. The Peoples' Democratic Congress, founded in 2011, was the first structural alliance in Turkey between the national movement and the socialist left. In Ertuğrul Kürkçü's words, by 2016 the HDK had remained "entirely in the shadow of the Peoples' Democratic Party" and had lost its "mode of existence". The reasons: strategic decisions taken outside the congress, the scattering of the line of becoming a party of Turkey with the collapse of the peace process in 2015, state pressure, a togetherness built not in the base but only at the ballot box, and the single-list imposition of 2023.

The approach to the other class parties: from partnership to tutelage. In 2023 a single list was imposed on the Workers' Party of Turkey (TİP) and the Labour Party (EMEP); when they refused, it was said that "this alliance is no longer an electoral alliance". In 2024, when the component party SYKP announced a different position in Istanbul, it was scolded for "not conforming to the law of the alliance". In 2026 it was said of Alevi intellectuals elected from the party's own lists that they were "names we picked up off the street and made into members of parliament"; the answer to the criticism was "that was yesterday". The socialist parties learned the content of the framework law from leaks, like the public. This is not the language of an alliance; it is the language of patronage.

From a united party to a single agenda: narrowing. The HDP was founded with the claim of being the united party of all the oppressed of Turkey. Today DEM's demands relating to the process concentrate on two axes: Öcalan's position, and his conditions of work and communication; and the release of its own prisoners. In Diyarbakır Bakırhan says of İmralı "open the door, let the press and a civil-society organisation go"; he does not show the same insistence for Can Atalay, about whom the Constitutional Court has twice ruled a rights violation, in Silivri. In the framework-law debates it was not DEM that carried Atalay to the rostrum as the measure of the law, but Umut Akdoğan of the New Party: "Demirtaş should return home, Can Atalay should come to Parliament." Atalay's name does not appear in the parts of Bakırhan's General Assembly speech that reached the press. The right to strike, the minimum wage, pensions, the fund plunder, those dismissed by decree-law, the peace academics, the thousands of people on trial in the HDK case, the My Family Is Safe operations: none of these has a place as a condition on the bargaining table of the process. A party that holds in its hand the key to the constitutional arithmetic is using this power not for the general demands of democracy, but for a narrow agenda.

The Can Atalay matter is a litmus test. Article 153 of the Constitution says that the decisions of the Constitutional Court bind everyone. Atalay's situation is the barest proof of a legal regime in which even this article is not applied. A party that says "law", that says "a democratic constitution", that says "peace is made lasting by law", so long as it does not make the application of this decision a precondition of the process, will have used the demand for law not as a universal principle but as a selective item of bargaining.

DEM's value is standing in its place too. A tradition that has carried a people's political existence for thirty-five years, that has been closed nine times and founded again, that institutionalised women's equality with the co-chair system, that produced the most advanced examples of local democracy. A criticism made without seeing this value is incomplete. But the way to protect this value is to name the narrowing openly.

The reproach to the left is partly just, but its mirror is turned toward DEM too. The sentence "While there were guns, the problem was the gun. When the gun was laid down, the problem became peace" correctly catches the inconsistency of the nationalist wing of the left. We are not in that wing. But the same sentence can be asked of DEM from the other side: If the gun has been laid down, why did the agenda not open onto the whole of democracy, and narrow instead to the position of a single man?

In short: The door has opened. But the list of those waiting in front of the door is much longer than the list of those bargaining with the ones who hold the key. In whose name will the title deed of peace be issued? This dossier asks that question.

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METHOD AND A GUIDE TO READING

In this dossier we kept to these rules:

• The first-hand source is essential. The interview was read from Evrensel's own page. The law, the MGK communiqué, the congress speeches and the statements were taken from the primary reports of news agencies and newspapers. We gave a link from inside the text to every claim.
• We did not hide contradictions. When the same event was reported differently in two sources, we recorded both.
• We paid attention to the limit of legality. We mentioned armed organisations only by the names under which they appear in the news and in the interview, and factually. This dossier discusses a political party's legal activity and its statements open to the public.
• We measured the party by its own words. We assessed DEM not by the accusations directed at it, but by what it itself said and what it itself did.
• Our question is always the same: Who produces, who decides, who gains, who pays?

The sections of the dossier are these:

Section	Subject
The interview	What did Bakırhan say, and what did he not say?
The latest state of the process	The balance sheet of fifty-six days
A return to our earlier pieces	Where do our theses stand?
Chronology	From 1 October 2024 to 5 October 2026
Two co-chairs	The path of Bakırhan and Hatimoğulları, their stands at Parliament's moments of rupture
Family tree	Nine links from HEP to DEM
Elections and the mass base	The class of the vote
The HDP experience	Becoming a party of Turkey, and the siege
Why could the HDK not be sustained?	The anatomy of an alliance
From HEDEP to DEM	The new period and the Democratic Republic Movement
The value of the DEM Party	Giving it its due
From a united party to a single agenda	The criticism of narrowing, and the Atalay litmus test
The approach to the other class parties	From partnership to tutelage
A deep class analysis	Society, the table, leadership, secrecy, property, the constitution, the region
The reproach to the left, and our answer	"While there were guns, the problem was the gun"
Two tables and open questions	The official account, the class reading; questions to DEM
Concrete tasks	For the young comrades

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THE INTERVIEW: WHAT DID BAKIRHAN SAY?

The interview is made up of eleven headings. Let us pass through each with a short report and a first note. The quotations are taken as they stand from the text Evrensel published.

"A conflict of more than forty years cannot be measured by the daily tempo of two years"

Evrensel's question is hard, and it is in the right place: In two years the PKK took important steps, including the burning of weapons and dissolving itself; from the government side no concrete step came except a commission and a framework law; the government insists on coding the process as "a Turkey without terror". How should the gap be assessed?

Bakırhan says he does not agree with the whole of the picture. "In the last two years, neither the Middle East is the old Middle East, nor Turkey the old Turkey." He states that they read the coming, from the handshake to the dissolution, from the commission report to the law, "not as a point of arrival but as a strong beginning". And he sums up the philosophy of the process like this:

"What we call negotiation is not a table at which the parties think the same from the start. If it were, there would already be no need for negotiation. The table takes on meaning precisely where there are different expectations, different concepts and different anxieties."

And the warning: "In peace, patience is necessary, but uncertainty is not. Time can ripen a process; but if it is drawn out more than it should be, it also opens a field to its opponents."

First note: Bakırhan does not reject the asymmetry in the question — one side takes a decision of dissolution and of laying down arms, while the other side passes a law and then suspends even that — but he does not name it either. The metaphor of the "table" postpones asking who is sitting at the table and in whose house the table has been set. The negotiation is not running between two equal sides, but between a state and the representatives of a people that state has crushed for decades. So long as this asymmetry is not named, the call to "patience" turns, in practice, into a call directed at one side only.

The lengthening of the calendar: "If technical preparation turns into political postponement…"

The question: The framework law came out with a high vote, but the calendar has not become clear. Fidan says "suitable conditions have not formed in the field"; the "Movement Administration" says "the guns will not be laid down before Öcalan is free". The report did not reach the October MGK. What are the risks?

Bakırhan distinguishes between a technical delay and a political postponement: Where, to whom and how the weapons will be laid down; with what legal status the returns will take place; the mechanisms of registration and supervision require planning. He reads the phrase "the steps taken and the distance covered" in the 30 September MGK communiqué as a positive sign. And he gives the example of Northern Ireland: "The disarmament argument spread over seven years, the executive was suspended again and again. Then we witnessed very bad events."

The strongest sentences are these:

"In peace processes there is no such thing as a vacuum. When politics leaves a vacuum, suspicion, provocation and opposition fill that field."

"The relevant boards must be formed quickly, their duties defined clearly, the mechanism of laying down arms and of return made concrete, and then the passage to the new stage made. There is no obstacle in front of this."

First note: The sentence "there is no obstacle in front of this" is an optimistic political statement, not a finding of fact. There is an obstacle: the entry into force of the law has been tied to the determination of a security institution; this determination has been left to the discretion of a political will; and that will, as far as can be understood, prefers to make the determination simultaneous with other bargains. We wrote this in August. Bakırhan's Northern Ireland warning is, however, extremely well placed: after the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, the stretching of disarmament to 2005, and the repeated suspension of the executive, opened a field to the opponents of the process. The difference is that in Northern Ireland the text of the agreement had been put to a popular vote; in Turkey the process is running inside a regime of secrecy.

"We expect Öcalan to work in the capacity of coordinator"

The question: How will Öcalan's contribution to the Subcommittee on Disarmament and Strategic Coordination be?

Bakırhan's answer is the clearest expression of the party's present ideological axis:

"The Peace and Democratic Society Process is advancing on the axis of Mr Öcalan's political leadership. No one else would make the call of 27 February, or obtain the same results."

And the demand: the "recognition of Öcalan's law", the "creation of free conditions of work and communication", his working on the subcommittee "in the capacity of coordinator". Mehmet Uçum, the President's chief adviser, had confirmed on 17 September that Öcalan would join this committee (art-izan agenda note).

First note: There are two separate things here, and they need to be separated. The first is legal: a prisoner's access to communication, a lawyer, family visits and conditions of work is a right; the European Court of Human Rights' 2014 "right to hope" judgment is a part of this too. Defending this is every democrat's duty. The second is political: a party's defining its whole strategy "on the axis of the political leadership" of a single leader. This second, as we will see in the section "A deep class analysis" below, is the knot of the problem of inner-party democracy and of becoming social.

The return of PKK members: "No one returns to uncertainty"

The section that gives the interview its title. Bakırhan says they expect the first returns to begin "before winter", that they think October could be a beginning, and that this expectation has not "wholly disappeared". But he says that "we too do not have in hand today a picture that has been settled" on whether all of the returns will be to Turkey, and which groups will come on which calendar. Then the door sentence comes:

"The framework law opened the legal door to this; but the opening of the door and people's going inside are not the same thing. Because no one returns to uncertainty. People return not to a place where they do not know what will happen to them tomorrow, but to a ground whose law, status and guarantee have been determined."

First note: This is the most honest and the most important sentence of the interview. Because it gathers the whole impasse of the process into a single image. Law, status and guarantee: all three of these three words are suspended in Turkey today. In a country where the rulings of the Constitutional Court and of the European Court of Human Rights are not applied, where trustees are appointed in place of elected mayors, where a nurse who has been acquitted is dismissed from the profession, where is the "ground whose law has been determined"? Bakırhan's question holds not only for those who will return from the mountain, but also for the millions living on the plain. The house behind the door is uncertain for those already living inside it too.

A new constitution: "Neither the imposition of a political agenda, nor 'I'm sulking, I'm not playing'"

The question: The government wants the consensus in the framework law to be secured for a new constitution too; the expectation is that the amendment will open the way for Erdoğan to be able to stand again. What is your position?

Bakırhan says the institutional view has not yet been discussed in the Party Assembly and the Central Executive Board, and that it will be shared "in the days ahead". The position of principle is: "Turkey needs a new but democratic constitution." And the critical sentence:

"It is not right to squeeze the constitution, which is Turkey's definite need, into the argument over electing and being elected. […] The constitution is a necessity beyond an election, beyond one person's being elected or not."

And the formula of balance: "One should neither fall into the mistake of imposing a political agenda, nor into the apoliticism of 'I'm sulking, I'm not playing'."

First note: This answer leaves the door open. The sentence "it is not right to squeeze it into electing and being elected" can be read in two directions: both as "do not reduce the constitution to Erdoğan's candidacy", and as "do not put the matter of Erdoğan's candidacy in front of the constitutional talks as an obstacle". As we showed in Whose Contract Is the Constitution?, the core of the government's constitutional package is to make the powers of the executive permanent "while the first four articles are preserved". To say "a democratic constitution" without saying yes or no to this core leaves open the question of who will write the constitution. In August, in Closed Door, Leaked Text, Hired Mind, we recalled the arithmetic of Parliament: the only bloc that can close the vote gap required for standing again is the DEM group. This is not an accusation; it is an arithmetical fact. And this fact loads an extraordinary weight onto every sentence of DEM's on the constitution.

Demirtaş: "To criticise the path is not to give up walking"

The question: Demirtaş's "puzzle" note announcing Mızraklı's release was read as a criticism directed at the framework law and at DEM.

Bakırhan first gives the due: "Selahattin Demirtaş, independently of every kind of process, has suffered a grave injustice. The rulings of the Constitutional Court and of the European Court of Human Rights are there, and so is the fact that they have not been applied. His release is not a favour; it is the debt of the law. If the missing piece of the puzzle is absolutely to be looked for, that too is the law." Then: "Demirtaş may have criticisms of the course of things; we have them too […] But those who read this as an opposition to the process will have done an injustice."

First note: The sentence "his release is not a favour, it is the debt of the law" is exactly in its place. But the question is this: Why was this debt not written into the framework law? The Grand Chamber judgment of the European Court of Human Rights in the Demirtaş case is dated 22 December 2020. The law came out on 10 August 2026. In between there are five and a half years and an opportunity to make a law. DEM's not tying its "yes" in the vote on the law to the payment of this debt is itself that missing letter in Demirtaş's puzzle. In Demirtaş's note of 5 September, one line of the puzzle referred to the MGK decision required for the law to enter into force (Open Questions on the Peace Process).

Pressure on the opposition: "If the possibility of peace is even one in a billion…"

The question: How is peace with the Kurds possible while the government continues its operations against the opposition, beginning with the New Party?

Bakırhan accepts that the pressures reduce confidence in peace: "The running of judicial processes against the opposition, and against those who think, speak and act critically, reduces confidence in the peace process and the contributions to it." But the conclusion: "We must not give up our struggle for peace because there is pressure; if the possibility of peace is even one in a billion, we must insist to the end."

First note: Morally, a strong sentence. Politically, incomplete. Because it positions the pressure as "an external factor that reduces confidence in the peace process"; whereas the same government's setting a peace table with one hand and liquidating the opposition with the judiciary with the other is not a side effect, it is the two faces of a single strategy. In Gramsci's language: consent and force are the two instruments of the same project of hegemony. In our hegemony piece in August we told this with the concept of "passive revolution".

"We cannot see peace as the DEM Party's business alone"

The question: The criticisms directed at the words of Faik Özgür Erol, a member of the İmralı Delegation, that "the intellectuals are not giving enough support", and at the Alevis' reaction to the reference to Idris-i Bitlisi and Yavuz Selim — is the party not managing the process well?

Bakırhan first tells the labour: "We travelled Turkey from end to end, again and again. Door to door, city to city, section to section." Then self-criticism: "Did we have shortcomings? We did. And we were not afraid to say so. […] A politics that cannot say its shortcoming cannot grow." And the basic thesis:

"Peace is not a matter small enough to be carried on the back of a single party. Turkey's peace has to be the common work of Turkish society."

First note: The sentence of self-criticism is valuable, and an openness we do not often hear from the DEM leadership. But the interview does not make concrete which shortcomings were seen. Yet there is a concrete example: Bakırhan's answer, on a television programme, to the declaration that 53 Alevi intellectuals published on 2 September — "Names we picked up off the street and made into members of parliament […] If criticising the Kurdish Movement is being an intellectual, then, pardon me, that was yesterday" (Cumhuriyet). This speech contradicts the sentence in the Evrensel interview, "we have to listen, we have to review our language". If a self-criticism is to be made, it should have been made first of all of this sentence.

"There is a circle whose approaches we have difficulty understanding"

The section of the interview that concerns us most directly. Bakırhan says he separates those opposed to the process from those who carry "anxiety and a question mark". He states that they take as essential "putting the question mark in the right place", and that they do not place the question marks "behind peace, or behind the democratic solution's being based on negotiation". Then:

"For long years there were circles that argued that the obstacle in front of the struggle of labour and of democracy was the PKK's armed struggle. Today the PKK has announced that it has dissolved itself and ended the armed struggle. Did the thing these circles had wanted for years not come about? But from them we felt neither a joy nor a sentence of responsibility. […] While there were guns, the problem was the gun. When the gun was laid down, the problem became peace."

And: "Peace is not democracy itself. The laying down of arms does not democratise the country in a day […] But one of the heaviest obstacles in front of politics is being lifted. Both the struggle of labour and the struggle for democracy can now walk in a wider field."

We take this reproach seriously, and we answer it in detail in the section "The reproach to the left, and our answer".

Syria and Mazlum Abdi: "Trust is not built with statements; it is built with practice"

Mazlum Abdi had announced that on 25 August the SDF dissolved itself in Damascus and integrated into the Syrian army (Diken). Bakırhan finds the developments "generally positive", but says that for education in the mother tongue "a lasting and constitutional arrangement is still needed". As for the "Movement Administration's" criticisms of Abdi: "This is a matter Rojava will talk through and decide inside itself."

First note: The principle "trust is not built with statements; it is built with practice" is right — but this principle holds for Ankara too. While Bakırhan applies this measure to Damascus, in the process in Turkey he trusts a statement, saying "there is the phrase 'the distance covered' in the MGK communiqué". The measure should be one.

The answer to Özel, the congress, and the fund plunder

To the words of Özgür Özel, chair of the New Party, on 16 September, that "what will secure the social contribution to the process is Demirtaş's reaching his home, rather than Öcalan's reaching his new residence" (Medyascope), Bakırhan answers by recalling that "the matter is not the residence, it is the position": "We do not have to open one person's right to argument in order to give another his due." On this point Bakırhan is right: To set rights up as alternatives to one another is contrary to the idea of right itself. But a distinction set up in the continuation of the same answer draws attention: According to Bakırhan, the freedom of Demirtaş, of Yüksekdağ, of Atalay and of the political prisoners is a "matter of law", while Öcalan's role and conditions of work are "the process's own heading". That is, Öcalan's position is on the table, Atalay's freedom is outside the table. We discuss what this distinction means in the section "From a united party to a single agenda".

Of the 6 September congress he says it is "the beginning congress of the new period of restructuring": the Democratic Republic Movement was declared, the real root change will be at the next congress. The aim: "to show that those left outside in the history of modernisation running from the Ottoman Empire to the Republic and to today — in some cases the Kurds, in some cases the Alevis, in every case women, the young, the poor, the workers and others — can govern Turkey."

As for the fund plunder: "The citizens of this country want three things […] Bread, Dignity and a Future." He says that the savings of 500 thousand investors have entered uncertainty, that "the trace of the money is clear, those who made the transactions are clear", and he proposes that the problem be taken up "with a third-way point of view, without seeing it as a classic corruption".

First note: The phrase "in every case the workers" is one of the two places in the interview where the word worker appears. The other is "the struggle of labour" in the reproach to the left. The answer on the fund plunder is interesting: the phrase "third way" points to a line that adopts neither the moralism of corruption nor the defence of the market, but it does not fill it in. As we showed in our pieces on the fund crisis in the exchange dossier, the fund crisis is the story of how the small saver was made fodder for finance capital; the name of this is not "the third way", it is capital accumulation itself.

First Impression: The Diagnosis from Law, the Prescription from Patience

In the TİP dossier we had said of Erkan Baş's interview "the diagnosis from class, the prescription from law". For Bakırhan's interview the formula might be this: The diagnosis from law, the prescription from patience.

At every knot of the process Bakırhan puts his finger in the right place: legal guarantee, status, the non-application of the rulings of the Constitutional Court and of the European Court of Human Rights, the trustees, the pressures. But the prescription is the same every time: patience, insistence, the table's not breaking up, contact with society. This prescription is understandable when you think of a people's forty-year pain. But the question of to whom patience is proposed, for how long, and with what expectation of a return, remains unanswered. Patience can be a strategy for one side, and an instrument for gaining time for the other.

There is also an unseen subject in the interview: the working class. The Kurdish labourer, the Turkish labourer, the Arab, Alevi, Armenian labourer. The section that is most curious about what peace will bring to it, and that is never mentioned at the table. We will return to this gap in the sections "A deep class analysis" and "From a united party to a single agenda".

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THE LATEST STATE OF THE PROCESS: THE BALANCE SHEET OF FIFTY-SIX DAYS

Bakırhan says "a strong beginning". Let us draw up a balance sheet too: what was promised when the law was adopted on 10 August, and what has come about as of 5 October?

The law: It exists legally, it does not exist in practice

Law no. 7595 on National Solidarity and the Strengthening of Social Integration was adopted on 10 August 2026, at the end of a twelve-hour session, by 467 in favour, 87 against, 7 abstentions (T24). The distribution of the votes was this:

Party	Position
AKP	268 yes
DEM Party	55 yes
MHP	44 yes
The New Party	33 yes, 54 no (it split)
CHP	29 yes, 2 no
İYİ Party	29 no

Numan Kurtulmuş, the Speaker of Parliament, said that this consensus "is rarely seen even in constitutional votes". He was right. But the most critical provision of the law is the provision that ties its entry into force to a political-security determination: the determination and confirmation by the security institutions that the PKK/KCK "has ended its de facto existence and has handed over the weapons and ammunition under its control", an MGK decision, publication in the Official Gazette, and then a six-month period of application.

The second article of the eight-article communiqué of the MGK that met on 30 September is this: "The steps taken and the distance covered in the direction of the aims of a Turkey without Terror and a Region without Terror have been assessed; […] it has been stated that the efforts expended will be continued with determination" (Hürriyet). No determination, no confirmation, no calendar (bianet). According to statements coming from the AKP, the MGK decision can be expected only in December.

Bakırhan reads this communiqué as "the process is advancing". We read the same communiqué as "the door is open but the key is in the pocket". Both readings are faithful to the text; the difference between them is whose confidence you rest on.

Three calendars, one law

The present impasse of the process is three centres speaking with three separate calendars:

Centre	What does it say?	Source
Ankara	"Concrete steps relating to the laying down of arms have not taken place so far." First, confirmation from the field.	Hakan Fidan, NTV, 20 September (report)
Qandil	"If Öcalan is not free we will not lay down the guns and we will not go to Turkey." In the law "the foundations of a solution to the Kurdish question are not to be found."	Cemil Bayık, 18 September (Halk TV); Duran Kalkan, 22 September: the law was "passed in order not to be applied"
İmralı	"The gun should no longer be sanctified. The old form leads to defeat." Stronger weapons are "the word, the law, organised society".	A message that reached the press, 29 September (Takvim report)
DEM Party	"A technical delay should not turn into a political postponement." The first returns before winter.	Bakırhan, Evrensel, 5 October

Read this table carefully. Ankara wants the gun, Qandil wants freedom, İmralı questions the sanctity of the gun, DEM wants patience. Each waits for the other to take a step. In theory this is called a "security dilemma"; from the point of view of class the real question is another: In none of these four centres do the millions who will live the result of the process have a word, an organ, a vote. The calendar is a matter of bargaining among those sitting at the table; those outside the table learn the calendar from the news.

The institutions: the Monitoring Board and the subcommittees

The Monitoring Board set up under the law met for the first time on 25 August. It was confirmed by Uçum that Öcalan would join the Subcommittee on Disarmament and Strategic Coordination. Kurtulmuş, the Speaker of Parliament, said that the setting up of the monitoring commission would begin after 1 October. Bakırhan's call for "the relevant boards to be formed quickly" points to this gap: although two months have passed since the law came out, some of the structures the law foresees have still not been set up.

The composition of the boards matters too. In our first piece in August (What Does the 2026 "Framework Law" Conceal?) we wrote that the law ties judicial processes to administrative boards attached to the Presidency and to the MGK, and that this contradicts the principle of the separation of powers. Today, when the boards will work, with whom, and at what level of transparency, has still not been shared with the public.

The prisoners: those left outside the door

The most concrete measure of the process is the prison doors. Look at who came out, and who is inside:

Person / section	Situation (5 October 2026)
Selahattin Demirtaş	Inside. Since 4 November 2016. The Grand Chamber judgment of the European Court of Human Rights (22 December 2020) was not applied. 42 years in the Kobani case, the file on appeal. DEM had said on 18 August that he "will come out under the law".
Figen Yüksekdağ	Inside. More than 30 years' imprisonment in the Kobani case.
Can Atalay	Inside. Despite two rights-violation rulings of the Constitutional Court. A 24-hour hunger strike on 1 October. (Parliament Is Opening, but What Is It For?)
Selçuk Mızraklı	Came out on 8 September — not by the framework law, but by completing his sentence. (our Mızraklı piece)
Osman Kavala	Inside. The answer to the European Court of Human Rights ruling was "know your place".
The peace academics	Outside the scope of the law. Ten years later, still no return to the university. (The Price of Wanting Peace: The Tenth Year on 1 September)
Those dismissed by decree-law	Outside the scope of the law.
The defendants in the HDK case	Inside the peace process, detentions and arrests in February 2025; outside the scope of the law.
Öcalan	On İmralı; a new residence, a subcommittee duty, on the agenda. Outside the scope of the law's deferral provisions.

On 18 August, the day the law was published in the Official Gazette, Tayip Temel, DEM deputy co-chair, had said that with the law about "four thousand people would be released", and that Demirtaş and Yüksekdağ too would come out under the law; for those left outside the scope he added that "a periodic board would assess the files one by one" (Artı Gerçek). Fifty-six days later none of these four thousand people has come out, because the law has not entered into force.

Mızraklı's release was presented as a success of the process, but it was not. He completed his sentence. Seven years. From a file whose only evidence was the undocumented statement of a secret witness, for having been mayor for four months. When he came out, his first sentence was this: "The one who should have been in front of this door before me is Selahattin Demirtaş." This sentence is the other face of Bakırhan's metaphor of the door. The door was set ajar for those who will return from the mountain; but the prison doors stayed closed to those who are inside for having spoken for peace.

The trustees: "Trustee means plunder"

Between 2016 and 2024 trustees were appointed to 164 municipalities; in 2024–25, 13 more municipalities were added to these. When Bahçeli said in 2025 "the Ahmets to office", the return to their posts of Ahmet Türk, co-mayor of Mardin Metropolitan Municipality, and of Ahmet Özer, mayor of Esenyurt, was expected. In April 2026 Özer told Medyascope "Bahçeli gave his word four times". The term of the trustee appointed in Türk's place was extended by two more months on 3 July (Evrensel).

On 30 September the dismissed DEM mayors met in Mardin. Ahmet Türk's words: "Trustee means plunder." 57 immovable properties of Mardin Metropolitan Municipality had been put up for sale (Halk TV).

This is a class fact. We had shown it in our Mızraklı piece: a trustee is not only the usurpation of an electoral will; it is the taking of the municipal budget out of supervision, the changing of hands of public immovable property, the closing of municipal cooperatives and of women's centres. That is, it is the liquidation of the commons. So long as the peace process does not touch the trustee regime, the material equivalent of peace for the labourers of the region remains missing. Ahmet Türk says "we support it with patience"; the same day his municipality's plots are being sold.

The opposition: the same government's other hand

What happened in the same months the process was running:

• 24 July: an "absolute nullity" ruling against the CHP. Özgür Özel and 91 members of parliament resigned and founded the New Party (Euronews).
• 12–13 September: a simultaneous operation in eighteen provinces against LGBTİ+ associations under the name "My Family Is Safe" (Whose Family Is Safe?).
• The end of September: the closing of T24, the arrest and release of the comedian Deniz Göktaş.
• The fund plunder: the savings of more than 500 thousand citizens in uncertainty.

Bakırhan mentions these as developments that "reduce confidence in peace". We go one step further: these are the description of the political regime inside which the process is running. Peace is being designed inside this regime and by its rules. To expect the content of peace to change without the regime changing is itself the "fetishism of law" that we named in August.

The region: the geopolitical calendar of peace

The calendar of the process outside Turkey needs to be seen too:

• 17 June 2026: the US–Iran agreement.
• 29 January 2026: a ceasefire and a phased military-integration agreement between Damascus and the SDF; 25 August: the dissolution of the SDF.
• 16 September: the visit to Ankara of Iran's Interior Minister: "The PKK, PJAK and all their branches must end their existence."
• The end of September: agreements between Turkey and Iraq on the PKK's withdrawal from the region reached the press.
• The third article of the MGK communiqué: in Syria, "the extension of state authority over the whole of the country, and the positive developments in the integration process."

In August, in the Closed Door piece, we had said this: the silencing of the guns is also an instrument for making the investment climate of regional capital safe. The Development Road project running from Iraq to Turkey, the reconstruction of Syria, the energy corridors — all of these want a Kurdish geography without guns. This does not mean that peace is bad. It means that what peace means for whom differentiates in class terms. For the construction company, peace means a new tender; for the construction worker, peace means working on the same scaffold, for the same wage, but now without the fear of a military operation. Both are true; they are not the same thing.

The balance-sheet table

Promise or expectation (August 2026)	Situation (5 October 2026)
The law will enter into force quickly	No MGK determination; December is awaited
The first returns may begin in October	No calendar; Bakırhan says "before winter"
The boards will be set up	The Monitoring Board met; the monitoring commission after 1 October
Steps of democratisation will come	The democratisation provision in the law has no calendar; no concrete regulation
"Four thousand people will be released" (DEM, 18 August)	None came out; Demirtaş, Yüksekdağ, Atalay, Kavala are inside; Mızraklı completed his sentence
The trustees will go	The trustees are in place; terms are being extended; immovable properties are being sold
The peace academics, those dismissed by decree-law	Outside the scope
Education in the mother tongue	Not on the agenda; Article 42 of the Constitution is in place
Becoming social	The argument over intellectuals and Alevis; a crisis of confidence

We do not read this table as "the process has failed". A period in which the guns have largely fallen silent, the organisation has taken a decision of dissolution, and Parliament has spoken of the matter, is a real rupture after a forty-year conflict. Bakırhan is right when he says this. But we cannot read the table as "the process is advancing" either. The reading is this: On the side of the gun, large steps were taken; on the side of rights, almost no step was taken. So long as this asymmetry continues, peace becomes synonymous with "disarmament", and "democratisation" remains suspended as the subject of the next bargain.

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A RETURN TO OUR EARLIER PIECES: WHERE DO OUR THESES STAND?

In August and September we published eleven pieces on this site on the framework law and the peace process. It is easy to write a piece and forget it. What is hard is to return two months later and ask "what did we say, what happened". Class politics cannot be a politics that does not test its claims against the fact.

An examination, piece by piece

Piece	Main thesis	As of 5 October
What Does the 2026 "Framework Law" Conceal? (9 Aug)	By tying entry into force to the MGK, the law produces a "hostage politics"; the selective scope is contrary to the principle of equality.	Confirmed. No MGK determination. Those left outside the scope are still outside.
The Class Anatomy and Historical Guilt of Those Who Say "Yes" to the Framework Law (10 Aug)	The "yes" is the twin of the 2010 "not enough, but yes"; it is an approval for which no return was received.	Confirmed. In return for the "yes", neither democratisation nor release came. Only, we must put one distinction more clearly: the Kurdish people's demand for peace and the party leadership's bargaining strategy are not the same thing. Our criticism is of the second.
A Dialectical Assessment of Can Atalay's Statement on the "Framework Law" (10 Aug)	The discourse of "politics without violence" can slide into a fetishism of law.	To be thought again. Atalay defended peace, he defended the law; but the first victim of the law was again himself. None of the parties to peace put his freedom on the table. The criticism we directed at Atalay, looked at from today, had not weighed the moral weight of his situation enough.
Class Analysis of the Framework Law and Socialist Strategy (11 Aug)	The law is an instrument of passive revolution; socialists must build an independent class line.	Confirmed. Consent (the law, the commission) and force (operations against the opposition) are working at the same time.
A Class Assessment of Mustafa Yalçıner's "Framework Law and Positions" (11 Aug)	A position that puts workers' rights at the centre is valuable, but it does not see the state's restructuring as a whole.	In place.
Rejecting the Ruling Class's Playing Field: The Reality of Hegemony, Passive Revolution, and an Independent Class Line (14 Aug)	The choice of "yes/no" on the government's playing field should be refused; the class should set the agenda.	Confirmed, but incomplete. We did not show enough what the independent class line would do concretely. The "Concrete tasks" section of this dossier tries to close that gap.
An Open Invitation to Deniz Zeyrek on the Reality of Hegemony and the Class Horizon (14 Aug)	An analysis that focuses on leaders' intentions misses the material substance.	In place.
Closed Door, Leaked Text, Hired Mind (28 Aug)	The process is running with a regime of secrecy; the electoral arithmetic is decisive; intellectuals are assigned a role of "approval"; the silencing of the guns overlaps with regional capital's need for an investment climate.	Largely confirmed. The constitutional argument brought the arithmetic forward; the argument over intellectuals grew; the Iraq–Syria axis accelerated.
The Price of Wanting Peace: The Tenth Year on 1 September (1 Sep)	A door opened to the one who lays down the gun, closed to the one who wants peace: which peace's door is it?	Confirmed. The academics are outside the scope; DEM did not put them forward as a condition either.
Open Questions on the Peace Process (8 Sep)	The name of the process, those at the table, the secret understanding, Demirtaş, the position of the socialists, the guarantee of the returns, the regional chess.	The questions are still open. The Bakırhan interview answers two of them indirectly; it does not touch the others at all.
Who Is Selçuk Mızraklı and Why Was He Kept Inside for Seven Years? (9 Sep)	Mızraklı's release happened not by the process but by the completion of the sentence; the trustee is the liquidation of the commons.	Confirmed.

What did we see rightly?

The structure of the law. We wrote that a law whose entry into force is tied to the MGK is a tap that the political will can open and close whenever it wants. Fifty-six days later the tap is closed. Bakırhan names this a "technical delay"; from Qandil, Duran Kalkan says the law was "passed in order not to be applied". We stand somewhere between the two: the law was written in this form not so that it could be applied, but so that whether it is applied or not would remain in the government's hand.

The asymmetry. We wrote that the side of the gun takes a step and the side of rights waits. The balance-sheet table shows this.

The wholeness of the regime. We wrote that the peace table and the operations against the opposition are the two faces of the same strategy. What has been lived since July — absolute nullity against the CHP, My Family Is Safe, the closing of T24, the silence in the face of the fund plunder — confirms this.

The language of patronage. In the Open Questions piece we had named Bakırhan's "picked up off the street" speech a "language of tutelage", and said "peace from above turns those below into objects". The section of this dossier on "The approach to the other class parties" shows that this language is not a single slip, but a pattern running since 2023.

What did we see incompletely?

We did not bring forward enough the objective gain of peace. In forty years more than forty thousand people died. For generations the mothers of this country, whatever language they speak, lived with the fear of waiting for their child's coffin. The silencing of the guns means the end of this fear. The conflict was the most effective instrument for dividing the class along national lines. Its ending is a historical possibility from the point of view of the class struggle, and in August we did not say this openly enough.

We did not separate the people and the party leadership enough. Some of our sentences put the Kurdish people's demand for peace, and the hope of the millions who vote for DEM, in the same scale as the party leadership's bargaining preferences. In this dossier we put the target of our criticism more clearly: the demand for peace is legitimate and it is ours; what we criticise is the squeezing of this demand into a narrow agenda, the dropping from the table of the general demands of the democratic struggle, and the language of patronage built against the other oppressed.

We did not show the alternative. We said "an independent class line", but we did not make concrete what this line means today for a Kurdish construction worker in Diyarbakır, in Esenyurt, in Mersin. It is easy to oppose; it is hard to put something in its place.

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CHRONOLOGY: FROM 1 OCTOBER 2024 TO 5 OCTOBER 2026

Let us see the two years of the process in one table. Where the dates contradict, we noted our sources.

Date	Event	Note
1 October 2024	At the opening of Parliament, Bahçeli goes to the DEM benches and shakes hands	The symbolic beginning of the process
22 October 2024	Bahçeli: let Öcalan come to Parliament and announce the organisation's dissolution, let the "right to hope" be spoken of	A rupture in the MHP's historical line
30 October 2024	Esenyurt mayor Ahmet Özer is arrested, a trustee in his place	A wave of trustees simultaneous with the process begins
4 November 2024	Trustees for Mardin, Batman, Halfeti; Ahmet Türk is removed	A trustee in Türk's place for the third time
December 2024	The İmralı delegation's meetings begin	Sırrı Süreyya Önder, Pervin Buldan
27 February 2025	Öcalan's "Call for Peace and a Democratic Society"	A call to the PKK to lay down arms and dissolve
1 March 2025	The PKK declares a ceasefire
3 May 2025	Sırrı Süreyya Önder dies	One of the most important civilian mediators of the process
12 May 2025	The PKK announces its dissolution by a congress decision
11 July 2025	A ceremony near Sulaymaniyah in which thirty militants burn their weapons	A symbolic laying down of arms
5 August 2025	The Grand National Assembly's Commission on National Solidarity, Brotherhood and Democracy holds its first meeting
September 2025	The commission's hearings of civil society; Eğitim Sen submits a written report	Demands for education in the mother tongue go on the record
26 September 2025	The Kobani case file reaches the appeal court
18 February 2025	Detentions of journalists, academics and artists within the HDK investigation	The participants of the HDP's founding congress are being tried inside the peace process
29 January 2026	A ceasefire and phased-integration agreement between Damascus and the SDF
18 February 2026	The commission's joint report is adopted by a qualified majority	DEM, the AKP and the MHP also submit their own reports
26 January – 19 August 2026	The detention, acquittal and dismissal from the profession of the nurse İkra Avcı	The emblem of a liquidation outside the law
29 April 2026	Ahmet Özer: "Bahçeli gave his word four times"	The returns of the trustees do not take place
June 2026	The argument over Erkan Baş's words "a mother tongue that is Kurdish"; Bakırhan: "we should stay away from discourses that will open the wounds"
17 June 2026	The US–Iran agreement	The regional calendar accelerates
3 July 2026	The term of the trustee in Ahmet Türk's place is extended by two months
24 July 2026	Absolute nullity against the CHP; Özel and 91 members of parliament found the New Party	The reshaping of the opposition
10 August 2026	Law no. 7595 is adopted with 467 votes	Entry into force depends on the MGK determination
18 August 2026	The law in the Official Gazette; Temel of DEM: "four thousand people will be released", "Can Atalay cannot stay inside"	None of the expectations came about
25 August 2026	The Monitoring Board's first meeting; the SDF announces its dissolution in Damascus	Two axes of dissolution on the same day
26 August 2026	The answer "know your place" to the European Court of Human Rights' Kavala ruling
The end of August	Faik Özgür Erol: "with this little intellectual support" was what was met	The argument over intellectuals begins
2 September 2026	The declaration of 53 Alevi intellectuals; Bakırhan's "picked up off the street…" answer
5 September 2026	Demirtaş's "puzzle" note: Mızraklı will come out on Tuesday
6 September 2026	DEM's 5th Ordinary Congress; the co-chairs are re-elected with all of the 535 votes; the Democratic Republic Movement is declared
8 September 2026	Mızraklı is released by completing his sentence
12–13 September 2026	The "My Family Is Safe" operations
14 September 2026	Öcalan: the process is at a stage that requires a step to be taken without delay	A meeting note
16 September 2026	Özel's "residence" speech; Iran's Interior Minister in Ankara
17 September 2026	Uçum: Öcalan will join the disarmament subcommittee
18 September 2026	Bayık: "if Apo is not free we will not lay down the guns"	Some sources give 22 September
20 September 2026	Fidan: "concrete steps have not taken place"
22 September 2026	Kalkan: the law was "passed in order not to be applied"
27 September 2026	At the Diyarbakır provincial congress Bakırhan: "for the first time in a hundred years the Kurds are not on the menu, they are at the table"; for İmralı, "open the door"; in Erzurum, Hatimoğulları tells of the fund plunder
29 September 2026	A message from İmralı, "the gun should no longer be sanctified", reaches the press
30 September 2026	The MGK communiqué: "the distance covered" — no determination; in Mardin the mayors who are victims of trustees meet
1 October 2026	Parliament opens; a new constitution weighs heavily in Erdoğan's speech; the second year of the process is completed. Can Atalay is on a 24-hour hunger strike in Silivri; TİP boycotts the opening, DEM carries Atalay's photograph into the General Assembly
5 October 2026	Bakırhan's Evrensel interview

When this chronology is looked at carefully, a pattern is seen: Beside every "peace" step there is a "pressure" step. A month after Bahçeli's handshake, the wave of trustees. While the commission's work continues, the nurse's liquidation. Two weeks after the law's adoption, "know your place" to the European Court of Human Rights. A week after the congress, My Family Is Safe. This is not a coincidence, it is a technique of government: one door is opened while the other is closed, so that no one asks what is beyond the open door.

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TWO CO-CHAIRS: BAKIRHAN AND HATİMOĞULLARI

To understand a party one needs to know the path of those who lead it. DEM's two co-chairs have been leading the party together since 15 October 2023, and at the congress of 6 September 2026 they were re-elected by taking all of the 535 valid votes. The path of the two represents the party's two founding traditions: the core of the national movement, and the component of the Turkish left that joined the HDP.

Tuncer Bakırhan: from HADEP to DEHAP, from Siirt to Parliament

Tuncer Bakırhan was born in 1970 in the Susuz district of Kars. He finished the Economics Department of Uludağ University. From 1989 on he took up duties in the parties of the HEP line (bianet).

Year	Event
The 1990s	Duties in the parties of the HEP line; the HADEP Kars provincial chair
2002	DEHAP candidate for parliament from Kars; he takes enough votes in the province, but the party stays under the national threshold
2003–2005	DEHAP chair. In this period the party runs a peace campaign for the armed conflict to end
2004	He is prosecuted for using a Kurdish greeting in election work
After 2005	A member of the DTP founders' board and deputy chair; then deputy chair responsible for foreign relations in the BDP
2009	The DTP's candidate for mayor of Istanbul's Esenyurt
After 2009	He is held for about a year and a half within the KCK operations
30 March 2014	He is elected co-mayor of Siirt
November 2016	He is detained and arrested; a trustee is appointed to the municipality (Agos)
July 2018	Ten years' imprisonment on the claim of "membership of an organisation and propaganda"
October 2019	Release after about three years
September 2021	The European Court of Human Rights convicts Turkey of a rights violation on account of his detention
May 2023	Member of parliament for Siirt from the Green Left Party list
15 October 2023	Co-chair
November 2024	An Interior Ministry investigation is opened against him
10 August 2026	The General Assembly speech in DEM's name in the framework-law vote
2 September 2026	The words to Alevi intellectuals, "names we picked up off the street and made into members of parliament"
6 September 2026	He is re-elected at the 5th Congress; he declares the Democratic Republic Movement
27 September 2026	The Diyarbakır provincial congress: "for the first time in a hundred years the Kurds are not on the menu, they are at the table"
5 October 2026	The Evrensel interview

Bakırhan's path passes through almost every stage of the thirty-five years of the Kurdish political movement: closed parties, cases opened because he spoke Kurdish, the KCK arrests, the mayoralty, the trustee, prison, the European Court of Human Rights. This is an experience engraved on his own body. In all of Bakırhan's sentences on the process the weight of this experience is felt: the one who says "no one returns to uncertainty" is the voice of someone who has lived uncertainty in prison.

But the same path is also the path of a political culture. Since DEHAP, Bakırhan's politics has been the politics of carrying to Parliament and to the public the line set by the strategic centre of the national movement. From the peace campaign of 2003–2005 to the emphasis in 2026 that the process is advancing on the axis of Öcalan's political leadership, this line is consistent. Consistency is a virtue; but the same consistency also feeds a reflex that meets every voice remaining outside the centre's line as "opposition to the process" or as "that was yesterday".

Tülay Hatimoğulları: Arab, Alevi, socialist, feminist

Tülay Hatimoğulları was born in 1977 in the Samandağ district of Hatay, in an Arab Alevi family. She learned Turkish at the age of seven, at school; she lived in her own childhood what it means for the mother tongue to be forbidden at school. She finished the Faculty of Economics of Anadolu University. From her lycée years she took a place inside the socialist movement. When she was put forward as a candidate from Adana in 2018, she defined herself with four identities: "Arab, Alevi, socialist, feminist" (bianet).

Year	Event
1995	Among the founders of an art workshop in Samandağ working on Arabic theatre and music
2000	Among the founders of the Amargi Women's Academy
The 2000s	The administration of the Hatay branch of the Human Rights Association; the founding of a research institute on the Arab peoples of the Middle East; local journalism; organisations of labouring women; the founding of the Turkey Peace Assembly
The end of the 2000s – 2012	In the founding processes of the Democracy for Unity Movement, the HDK and the HDP
2016–2018	Co-chair of the Socialist Party of Refoundation (SYKP), one of the HDP's founding components
June 2018	HDP member of parliament for Adana; responsibility in the HDP's work in the field of belief
January 2020	In the HDP group that opposed the sending of soldiers to Libya
March 2021	One of the 687 people for whom a ban on politics was sought in the HDP closure case
May 2023	Member of parliament for Adana again
15 October 2023	Co-chair
15 September 2026	Against the "My Family Is Safe" operations: "Neither the family is safe, nor any of us"
27 September 2026	The Erzurum provincial congress: the fund plunder, the economic crisis, and the recognition of Kurdish

Hatimoğulları's path starts from a different place than Bakırhan's: from a poor Arab Alevi district of Turkey, from socialist and feminist organisation, from the women's academy, from the human-rights association. A representative of the left component that carried, at the founding of the HDK, the idea of "the united struggle of all the oppressed of Turkey". Her election to the co-chair was read as a sign that the HDP's legacy of becoming a party of Turkey was continuing.

Stands at Parliament's moments of rupture

The quality of a party and of those who lead it is seen not on calm days but at moments of rupture. In the table below we put side by side the tradition's attitude at the ruptures of Parliament and of the regime over the last thirty years, and where the two co-chairs stood at that moment.

Moment of rupture	The tradition's attitude	Bakırhan	Hatimoğulları
1994: the lifting of the DEP members' immunity, detention from Parliament	The de facto liquidation of Kurdish politics from Parliament; Leyla Zana and her friends in prison for ten years	A young cadre of the HEP line	The socialist movement in the lycée years in Samandağ
2003–2005: the EU harmonisation laws, limited rights of Kurdish broadcasting and courses	A peace campaign; the demand that the gains be widened	DEHAP chair; prosecuted for a Kurdish greeting	Amargi, women's and peace organisations
2009: the closure of the DTP, the KCK operations	Continuing the party under the BDP roof	DTP deputy chair; he goes to prison in the KCK arrests	The Democracy for Unity Movement, the Peace Assembly
2013–2015: the solution process, the Dolmabahçe understanding	Negotiation and becoming a party of Turkey	Co-mayor of Siirt	In the founding component of the HDK and the HDP
20 May 2016: the lifting of immunities	The HDP against; a part of the CHP supports it, saying "contrary to the constitution, but yes"	Mayor; arrested six months later	SYKP co-chair
2016–2017: the state of emergency, the decree-laws, the trustee regime, the referendum	The HDP on the "no" side; its co-chairs and members of parliament under arrest	In prison; a trustee in his municipality	SYKP co-chair
2 January 2020: the Libya mandate	The HDP votes no	After release	Member of parliament; no
2021: the closure case against the HDP	A demand for a ban on politics for hundreds of cadres	—	Among those for whom a ban on politics was sought
2023: the election, the single list, and support for Kılıçdaroğlu	The Green Left roof; insistence on a single list for TİP and EMEP	Member of parliament for Siirt	Member of parliament for Adana
30 January 2024: the stripping of Can Atalay's seat	DEM members protest in front of the rostrum with a banner "freedom for Can Atalay" (Medyascope)	Co-chair	Co-chair
2024–2025: the wave of trustees (Hakkari, Esenyurt, Mardin, Batman…)	Protest, "usurpation of the will"	Co-chair	Co-chair
10 August 2026: the framework law	55 yes; democratisation and the releases are not tied to a condition	The General Assembly speech: "A foundation on its own is not a house"; Atalay's name does not appear in the parts that reached the press	Co-chair
2 September 2026: the declaration of 53 Alevi intellectuals	A harsh reaction from the party leadership	"Names we picked up off the street and made into members of parliament", "that was yesterday"; the next day he steps back, saying it meant "opening a field in politics"	—
12–15 September 2026: the "My Family Is Safe" operations	An open objection from the party	—	"Neither the family is safe, nor any of us"
1 October 2026: the opening of Parliament and Atalay's hunger strike	TİP boycotts the opening; DEM attends, and carries Atalay's photograph into the General Assembly (Cumhuriyet)	Co-chair	Co-chair

This table says two things.

First: for thirty years this tradition was the target of pressure at every moment of rupture of the regime, and every time it resisted. In 1994, in 2009, in 2016, in 2021, in 2024. The two co-chairs' own lives are a part of this resistance too. This has to be granted.

Second: in 2025–2026 there is a change. For the first time in the history of the tradition the party is inside a process of negotiation with the regime, and in a decisive position in the regime's constitutional arithmetic. This position gives the party a bargaining power it has never had in its history. And the last rows of the table show how this power is being used: an unconditional yes to the framework law; for Atalay a photograph at the rostrum but no condition at the table; a harsh scolding of Alevi intellectuals; and the democracy agenda squeezed into one co-chair's provincial-congress speeches.

Two traditions, one voice

The co-chair system is valuable as the institutional expression of equality between women and men. But in DEM the co-chair system had a second meaning too: to hold side by side the core of the national movement and the component of the Turkish left.

Today this second meaning seems to have turned into a division of labour. Bakırhan speaks of the process, of Öcalan's position, of the returns, of the constitution; Hatimoğulları of My Family Is Safe, of the fund plunder, of the economic crisis, of women's rights. This could have been a richness. But at the bargaining table only the first agenda has a place. The second agenda stays at congress rostrums, in press statements, in social-media messages. It is not carried to the table; it is not made a condition of the process.

We want to ask Hatimoğulları a comradely question: When the SYKP, of which you were once co-chair, announced a different electoral position in Istanbul in 2024, it was scolded by DEM's Istanbul candidate, who said it "does not conform to the law of the alliance". Today the party's language toward Alevi intellectuals has wounded a community of which you too are a part. As a socialist and feminist co-chair, is it not your duty to carry to the table of the process the right to strike, the minimum wage, pensions, those dismissed by decree-law, the peace academics, Can Atalay? The legacy of becoming a party of Turkey lives not by being represented in a co-chair's identity, but by taking a place on the party's bargaining agenda.

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THE FAMILY TREE: FROM HEP TO DEM

Young comrades, to understand the DEM Party one first needs to know this: this party is the ninth link of a political tradition in Turkey that is founded again each time it is closed. No other political current has been banned so many times and come back so many times.

Link by link

Party	Founded	End	Note
HEP — People's Labour Party	1990	Closed by a Constitutional Court ruling in 1993	Members of parliament who entered Parliament from the SHP list in the 1991 elections; the word "labour" was in the party's name
ÖZDEP / DEP — Democracy Party	1993	Closed in 1994	The immunity of Leyla Zana and her friends was lifted, they were detained from Parliament; Zana stayed in prison for ten years
HADEP — People's Democracy Party	1994	Closed in 2003	In 1999 it won many municipalities in the region, including Diyarbakır
DEHAP — Democratic People's Party	1997	Dissolved itself in 2005, joined the DTP	Stayed under the threshold in 2002
DTP — Democratic Society Party	2005	Closed by a Constitutional Court ruling in 2009	Entered Parliament in 2007 by the method of "independent candidates"
BDP — Peace and Democracy Party	2008	Restructured in 2014 (into the DBP and the HDP)	In 2011, the "Labour, Democracy and Freedom Bloc"
HDP — Peoples' Democratic Party	2012	A closure case was opened in 2021; the party entered the elections under another roof	The experience of becoming a party of Turkey; 13 percent in 2015
Green Left Party / HEDEP	2023	The Court of Cassation objected to the abbreviation	The roof under which the HDP entered the 2023 elections
DEM Party — Peoples' Equality and Democracy Party	2023	Today	Co-chairs Tülay Hatimoğulları and Tuncer Bakırhan

One thing draws attention in this table: in the name of the first link there is the word labour. The People's Labour Party. In the later links this word disappears; in its place come "democracy", "society", "peace", "peoples", "equality". This is not a coincidence. The disappearance of the word is the sign of a political shift we will discuss below: from class to people, from people to society.

The class meaning of closure

Why so much closure? The official answer is always the same: "separatism", "an organic bond with terror". But when one looks at the timing of the closure rulings, something else is seen. Every closure coincides with the moments when the party obtained a concrete power in the region, by municipal or parliamentary representation. HADEP won the municipalities in 1999, and was closed in 2003. The DTP rose in the region in the 2009 local elections, and was closed in December of the same year. The HDP passed the threshold in 2015, its co-chairs were arrested in 2016, and a closure case was opened in 2021.

Closure is the taking, again and again, from a people's hands of its capacity to govern itself — at the most basic level, the capacity to govern the municipality. This is a dispossession: the dispossession of political representation, of the public budget, of the supervision of local resources. The trustee regime is a finer, more continuous, more "administrative" form of the closure cases.

The source of the endurance

What is the source of this tradition's being able to be born again nine times? Three things.

First, a common experience. In the 1990s, the emptying of villages, the unsolved killings, the forced migration. Even the Grand National Assembly's 1998 Migration Research Commission recorded, by the official figure, that 3,428 settlements were emptied and 378 thousand people displaced; the estimates of human-rights organisations are several times this. A people that has lived this experience binds to its own party more than a ballot paper.

Second, organisational continuity. Even if the parties closed, the cadres, the local networks, the people's assemblies, the women's organisations, the youth structures continued. The party was a signboard; the signboard changed, the organisation remained.

Third, an ideological centre. The political tradition has an ideological and strategic centre; in the party's language today this centre is openly called "the leadership". This centre secured unity against scattering. But the same centre, as we will see below, also became a source of tension from the point of view of inner-party democracy and of independent thought.

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ELECTIONS AND THE MASS BASE: THE CLASS OF THE VOTE

The ballot table of thirty-five years

Election	Roof	Vote	Result
1991 general	HEP candidates from the SHP list	—	More than twenty members of parliament
1995 general	HADEP	4.2%	Under the threshold
1999 general	HADEP	4.8%	Under the threshold; the same day, a great local success in the region
2002 general	DEHAP	about 6%	Under the threshold
2007 general	Independent candidates ("A Thousand Hopes")	—	Twenty members of parliament, a DTP group
2011 general	Labour, Democracy and Freedom Bloc	—	Thirty-six members of parliament
2014 presidential	Demirtaş	9.8%
June 2015 general	HDP	13.1%	80 members of parliament — the AKP lost single-party government
November 2015 general	HDP	10.8%	59 members of parliament
2018 general	HDP	11.7%	67 members of parliament; Demirtaş a candidate from prison, 8.4%
2019 local	HDP	—	65 municipalities; trustees for 48 of them
2023 general	Green Left Party	8.8%	61 members of parliament
2024 local	DEM	about 5.7%	Three of them metropolitan, ten provinces; trustees for 13 municipalities in 2024–25

This table says two things.

First, the vote base of the DEM tradition is stable. Between 6 and 13 percent, about 10 percent on average. This is one of Turkey's most stable electorates. Trustees, arrests, closure cases could not scatter this base.

Second, 2015 is an exception. June 2015, when the HDP rose to 13 percent, is the only moment when it reached, beyond the Kurdish voter, the left, liberal, Alevi, women and young voters in the west of Turkey. This moment, as we will see below, was closed with blood and violence.

The class of the vote: who votes for DEM?

We need to make a class analysis here; because the party's programme speaks not of "class" but of "the people", of "society", but the electorate has a definite class composition.

The labourers of the region. In the provinces of the East and the Southeast, DEM's base is made up of Turkey's poorest households. In these provinces unemployment, unregistered employment, and the lowness of women's employment are far above the Turkey average. That is, DEM's base in the region is, in the main, an unemployed and semi-unemployed industrial reserve army.

The Kurdish working class in the metropolis. The forced migration of the 1990s created a large Kurdish worker population in cities such as Istanbul, Izmir, Mersin, Adana, Antalya, Ankara. In Istanbul, Esenyurt, Bağcılar, Sultanbeyli, Gazi, Tarlabaşı; in Izmir, Kadifekale and its surroundings; Mersin's Akdeniz district. This population works in construction, in textiles, in the service sector, in courier work, in the heaviest and the most insecure jobs. That an important part of the workers who die on construction scaffolds are Kurdish is a fact that repeats every year in the workplace-killing reports. DEM's metropolitan base is the most exploited layer of the Turkish working class.

Seasonal agricultural workers. The great part of the hundreds of thousands of seasonal agricultural workers who migrate every summer from Çukurova to Konya, from Ordu to Eskişehir, are Kurdish families. This section, which stays in tents, which is forced to have its children work in the field, which dies together in traffic accidents, is the field where labour is exploited most nakedly.

Public employees and intellectuals. The teacher, the health worker, the lawyer, the academic. The organised sections of KESK. The section most affected by the decree-law dismissals.

The small tradesman and the small producer. In the region, agriculture, animal husbandry, border trade, small workshops.

A section of the Kurdish bourgeoisie. There is a Kurdish capital growing in the construction, energy, trade and service sectors in the region. The great part of this capital historically stood close to the AKP; a section of it, knowing that the recognition of national rights would widen its own market and tender possibilities, has fed a distanced sympathy for DEM.

This table tells us this: The DEM Party, in its class composition, is in the main a party of labourers — but in its class programme it is not a party of labourers. Its base is the worker, the unemployed, the seasonal worker, the public employee; its programme is "democratic society", "democratic nation", "democratic republic". This contradiction shows that DEM's greatest strength and its greatest weakness stand in the same place.

The intertwining of national oppression and class exploitation

Why is it so? Because the Kurdish labourer is crushed twice: once as a worker, once as a Kurd. And these two crushings cannot be separated in daily life. The worker who is dismissed from the job for speaking Kurdish, who cannot find a rent because of their identity, who is given the most dangerous place on the scaffold for being "from the East", lives national oppression inside class exploitation.

This intertwining can be read in two directions. The first reading: first the national oppression must be lifted, then the class struggle comes. This is a stagist reading, and DEM's programmatic line is largely close to it. The second reading: the struggle against national oppression must be organised as a part of the class struggle; where the Kurdish worker meets the Turkish worker in the same union, in the same strike, with the same demand, national oppression is shaken most deeply too. This second reading is ours.

The difference between these two readings becomes concrete in the peace process: according to the first reading, peace is a negotiation with the state for the solution of the national question. According to the second reading, peace is at the same time the lifting of the greatest obstacle in front of the common organisation of the two peoples' labourers — and the lifting of this obstacle turns into a gain not of itself, but by an organised effort.

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THE HDP EXPERIENCE: BECOMING A PARTY OF TURKEY, AND THE SIEGE

From the HDK to the HDP: the idea of an alliance

The HDP was born in 2012 as the political party of the Peoples' Democratic Congress (HDK), founded in 2011. The HDK was a congress structure in which the Kurdish political movement and a series of components of the Turkish left, and women's, ecology, LGBTİ+, belief and labour organisations, came together. The idea was this: the Kurdish question is not only the Kurds' question, it is Turkey's problem of democratisation; its solution too passes through the common struggle of all the oppressed of Turkey.

We discuss the fate of this idea in detail below, in the section "Why could the HDK not be sustained?". Let us say this here: this idea was important in Turkey's political history. Because for the first time a structural alliance was tried between the national movement and the Turkish left. Socialist parties and groups joined the HDK as components, and socialist members of parliament entered Parliament from the HDP lists.

7 June 2015: the peak

The 2015 election campaign began with Demirtaş's words "we will not let you become president". The HDP campaigned as a "party of Turkey" aiming to pass the threshold. There were Turkish voters who voted for the HDP on the western side of Istanbul, in Izmir, in Ankara, in Antalya. The result was 13.1 percent and 80 members of parliament. The AKP lost single-party government for the first time since 2002.

This moment was the moment when the struggle against national oppression and the general struggle for democracy met in Turkey in the widest form. It was two years after Gezi; a part of the generation that went into the street at Gezi met the Kurdish movement at the same ballot box for the first time.

7 June to 1 November: blood

Then you know what happened. But let us write it once more for the young comrades, because this period is being made to be forgotten:

• 28 February 2015: At Dolmabahçe the government and the HDP delegation announced to the public a ten-article framework of negotiation.
• March 2015: Erdoğan did not recognise the Dolmabahçe understanding: "There is no table."
• 7 June 2015: The election. The AKP lost its majority.
• 20 July 2015: A bomb attack in Suruç on socialist youth who had gathered to take toys to Kobani: 33 young people died.
• After July 2015: The clashes began again; the trenches, the curfews, the destroyed city centres — Sur, Cizre, Nusaybin, Yüksekova.
• 10 October 2015: A bomb attack in front of Ankara Station on the "Labour, Peace, Democracy" rally: more than a hundred people died. The bloodiest attack in Turkey's history. The rally had been called by DİSK, KESK, TMMOB and the Turkish Medical Association.
• 1 November 2015: The repeat election. The HDP fell to 10.8 percent; the AKP took back single-party government.

The class meaning of these five months is this: at the moment it was shown that in Turkey the movement of the oppressed nation and the labour movement could meet at the same ballot box, in the same square, that meeting was scattered with blood. Those who died in Suruç were socialist youth. Those who died in Ankara were the participants of a union-and-peace rally. The target of the attacks was the point where the Kurdish movement and the Turkish left intersect.

2016: the siege

• 20 May 2016: A constitutional amendment for the lifting of parliamentary immunity. A part of the CHP supported it, saying "contrary to the constitution, but yes". This attitude of Kılıçdaroğlu is a historical responsibility shared also by the cadres who today are founding the New Party.
• 15 July 2016: The coup attempt, and then the state of emergency.
• September 2016: Trustees began to be appointed to the municipalities in the region.
• 4 November 2016: The co-chairs Demirtaş and Yüksekdağ, together with many members of parliament, were detained and arrested.
• 2017–2018: Thousands of party members and administrators were arrested; thousands of public employees were dismissed by decree-law.

In this period the HDP turned from being a "party of Turkey" into a party waging a struggle to survive. The ties in the west on which the project of becoming a party of Turkey rested weakened; a part of the HDK components drew back; the weight shifted again to the region and to the core of the national movement.

The Kobani case: the trial of politics

The case opened on the ground of the Kobani events of 6–8 October 2014 concluded on 16 May 2024: Demirtaş was given 42 years, Yüksekdağ more than 30 years' imprisonment (bianet). The case was the turning of a party's political call — the call to go into the street — into a criminal case. The file reached the appeal court on 26 September 2025 (bianet); a ruling is still awaited today.

The Kobani case has remained outside the scope of the framework law. That is, while a path of deferral and of return is opened to the members of the armed organisation, the civilian politicians tried by being associated with that organisation remain inside. This is the deepest contradiction of the process, and Bakırhan's sentence "Demirtaş's release is the debt of the law" names this contradiction, but does not solve it.

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WHY COULD THE HDK NOT BE SUSTAINED? THE ANATOMY OF AN ALLIANCE

Young comrades, to understand today's DEM one needs to understand an absence: the absence of the HDK.

What had been meant to be founded?

The Peoples' Democratic Congress was founded in October–November 2011, after the June 2011 elections, resting on a legal form of organisation. Among its founders were the Kurdish political movement, socialist parties and groups, women's organisations, ecology organisations, LGBTİ+ associations, Alevi and belief communities, trade unionists, intellectuals and individual activists. In the words of Ertuğrul Kürkçü, one of the HDK's founders and a former co-chair of the HDP, the HDK was a "citizens' initiative" founded "for the peoples to govern themselves", resting on the principle of direct democracy (bianet).

The idea was this: the Kurdish question is not only the Kurds' question, it is Turkey's problem of democratisation. The solution of this problem passes through all the oppressed of Turkey — the Kurds, the Alevis, women, the workers, LGBTİ+ people, the Armenians, the Assyrians, the defenders of ecology — coming together as equals in their own congresses, in their own assemblies. The party would be the instrument of this congress that entered the elections. The congress the principal, the party the instrument.

The HDP was founded in 2012 as the party of this congress.

What happened?

Kürkçü's assessment in 2025 sums up the HDK's fate in a single sentence: when he handed over his duty in 2016, the HDK had remained "entirely in the shadow of the Peoples' Democratic Party" and had lost its initial "mode of existence". The congress was to be the principal, the party the instrument; the reverse happened. The party the principal, the congress the shadow.

And even this shadow did not escape the state's target. In 2022 a raid was made on the HDK's Istanbul centre. In the investigation opened afterwards, thousands of people's names appeared; the prosecution claimed that the HDK had been founded on Öcalan's instruction. In February 2025, that is, inside the peace process, four months after Bahçeli's handshake, journalists, academics, artists, lawyers were detained within the HDK investigation, and some of them were arrested (Serbestiyet). Taking part in a Zoom meeting was counted as evidence of "membership of an organisation".

One needs to stop and think here: While the peace process was running, the participants of the congress that had formed this process's widest democratic base in Turkey were being tried. And the freedom of these people was neither taken into the scope of the framework law nor given a place among DEM's conditions relating to the process.

Why could it not be sustained?

To explain the HDK's not being sustainable by state pressure alone would be easy and incomplete. The pressure was decisive, but it was not the only reason. Five reasons need to be seen together.

Strategic decisions were taken outside the congress. The HDK's principle was that decisions be taken in the congress, among equals. But the strategic decisions of the Kurdish political movement — to enter negotiation, to withdraw from negotiation, to continue or to leave the armed struggle — were taken not inside the HDK but at the movement's own strategic centre. The left components learned these decisions afterwards and carried their results. If in an alliance one of the parties takes the most important decisions outside the alliance, that alliance is not an alliance, it is a relation of support.

The breaking of 2015 scattered the line of becoming a party of Turkey. The line of becoming a party of Turkey, which peaked at 13 percent on 7 June, collapsed from July 2015 on, with the restarting of the clashes and the period of trenches and curfews in the city centres. The policy of this period was not discussed in the HDK. The left, liberal, Alevi, young voter in the west was faced on the one hand with the state's violence, and on the other with the results of a strategy determined without being consulted. That an important part of the roughly three points lost in November 2015 came from this section is one of the widespread assessments of that period.

State pressure physically scattered the structure. The arrests after 2016, the decree-laws, the trustees, and then the investigation directed at the HDK itself. A congress structure cannot meet in an environment where its participants are tried for "membership of an organisation".

The alliance was built at the ballot box, not in the base. The HDK did not take root in the factories, in the workplaces, in the unions, in the neighbourhoods. It existed not as the common organisation of Turkish and Kurdish workers in the same workplace, but as a common list in election periods. The voter who met at the ballot box did not meet at the workplace. When the attack came, the alliance's social foundation stayed weak. This was a shortcoming not only of the Kurdish movement but also of the left components: the socialist parties saw the HDK not as a ground that would bring their own worker base together with Kurdish labourers, but most of the time as a way of entering Parliament.

The logic of the quota ate equality. The left components' entering Parliament from the HDP lists turned over time into a "quota" relation. With Ruşen Çakır's finding in June 2026, the anxiety in socialist circles that "the Kurdish movement is using us", and in Kurdish circles the question "what do these people add to us?", grew. Bakırhan's words of 2 September, "we picked them up off the street and made them members of parliament", is the clearest expression of this quota logic: a seat in parliament is seen not as an authority a people has given, but as a favour a centre has given.

2023: the last blow

The last blow to the HDK legacy was struck in the 2023 election process. The Labour and Freedom Alliance was founded; but the HDP opposed TİP and EMEP entering the election with their own lists, and insisted on a single list (Medyascope). When TİP chose to enter with its own lists, the HDP's former co-chair Gültan Kışanak said that without a common list "this alliance is no longer an electoral alliance"; Demirtaş called on all socialists to vote for the Green Left lists (Medyascope).

The demand for a single list had its grounds from the point of view of electoral arithmetic. But its political meaning was clear: the alliance was being defined not as a plurality in which the components could exist with their own identities, but as participation in a single centre's list. The HDK's idea of "the congress the principal, the party the instrument" had turned into the idea of "the list the principal, the component a quota".

Where is the HDK today?

Today the HDK itself has withered, and some of its participants are being tried. The "Democratic Republic Movement" that DEM declared on 6 September looks in one sense like a return to the HDK idea: not a party but a movement, a wide roof. But there is a basic difference in between. The HDK had been founded on the equality and plurality of its components; its ideological frame was open, it was open to argument. The Democratic Republic Movement, however, is being declared as a structure whose ideological frame has been determined from the start — "democratic republic" is a concept Öcalan developed in the last twenty years — and which will be built "around basic pillars".

The question is this: Will this new movement draw a lesson from the HDK's failure? Or will it repeat the same failure in a still more centralised form? The test of an alliance is given not on the day it is declared, but at the first disagreement. The answer given to the Alevi declaration of 2 September shows that it did not get a good mark on the first question of this test.

The lesson to be drawn from the HDK

From a Marxist point of view an alliance is built among equals. The parties to the alliance keep their own programmes, their own organisations, their own voices; they act together around a common aim; they discuss their disagreements openly. If the common aim is being determined by one side, and the other sides are being called to support this aim, this is called not an alliance but patronage.

The HDK was the first attempt at a structural alliance in Turkey between the movement of the oppressed nation and the socialist left. It failed, because it could not institutionally guarantee the principle of equality. But this failure does not show that the idea was wrong. On the contrary: at the root of the peace process's not being able to become social today, of the Alevis' anxieties, of the intellectuals' distance, of the socialists' conditional "yes", there is the absence of the HDK. Bakırhan says "we cannot see peace as DEM's business alone". He is right. But for peace to be able to be everyone's business, a ground is needed on which everyone takes a place with an equal right to speak. That ground once existed. Its name was the HDK.

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FROM HEDEP TO DEM: THE NEW PERIOD

2023: the Green Left, and support for Kılıçdaroğlu

The HDP entered the 2023 elections under the roof of the Green Left Party, because of the risk of the closure case, and founded the Labour and Freedom Alliance. In the presidential election it supported Kılıçdaroğlu. This was the sign of the party's passage from a "third way" line to a line of "weight inside the opposition bloc". Kılıçdaroğlu lost; the protocol he made with Ümit Özdağ in the second round left a deep resentment in an important part of the Kurdish electorate.

This experience is important for understanding DEM's strategy today. 2023 became the year in which the Kurdish movement's search for a path of solution through the opposition bloc was blocked. A year later, Bahçeli's handshake opened the other door.

October–December 2023: the name, and the co-chair system

With the congress of 15 October 2023, Tülay Hatimoğulları and Tuncer Bakırhan became co-chairs. The party changed its name to the Peoples' Equality and Democracy Party; on the objection of the Chief Public Prosecutor's Office of the Court of Cassation to the abbreviation "HEDEP", the abbreviation became "DEM Party".

Tuncer Bakırhan is a politician who had been mayor of Siirt and who was himself removed by the trustee regime. Tülay Hatimoğulları is a politician of Arab Alevi origin, coming from the Turkish socialist movement. These two names represent the party's two components — the core of the national movement, and the component of the Turkish left that remained in the HDP. The co-chair system became an instrument, alongside equality between women and men, of these two traditions standing side by side.

2024: the local election, and a new wave of trustees

In the local elections of 31 March 2024, DEM won in ten provinces, three of them metropolitan. In some districts of the western provinces it cooperated, by the method of "city consensus", with the CHP, which was the forerunner of the New Party — Esenyurt was one of these.

Then, in June a trustee was appointed to Hakkari, and in October–November to Esenyurt, Mardin, Batman, Halfeti, and afterwards to other municipalities. This wave of trustees coincided with the very same weeks as Bahçeli's handshake. The government was setting the door of peace ajar with one hand, and usurping the electoral will with the other.

2025–2026: the party of the process

With Öcalan's call in February 2025, DEM's role changed. The party was now both an opposition party and the "mediating" and "facilitating" wing of one of the parties to the process. The members of the İmralı delegation — after Sırrı Süreyya Önder's death, Pervin Buldan, Mithat Sancar, Faik Özgür Erol and the others — became the carriers of the process.

This double role made every statement of the party's readable in two languages. As an opposition party, DEM criticised the absolute-nullity ruling directed at the New Party, the My Family Is Safe operations, the fund plunder. As the party of the process, it kept the clash with the government within certain limits. Bakırhan's interview is the clearest example of this double role: he names the pressure, but by saying "if the possibility of peace is even one in a billion" he subordinates the struggle against the pressure to the process.

6 September 2026: the Democratic Republic Movement

The 5th Ordinary Congress, postponed because of the three-year congress obligation of the Political Parties Law, was held on 6 September. The co-chairs were re-elected by taking all of the 535 valid votes (Medyascope). Two sentences from Bakırhan's congress speech:

"The seed fell into the soil in Ankara today, it will take root, its branch will grow, its shadow will fall on every inch of this country."

"We are now in a position not only of spoiling the game, but of setting the game and of being a candidate to govern Turkey."

In the Evrensel interview the frame of this transformation opens a little more: the building of the Democratic Republic Movement "around basic pillars"; at the next congress "a political understanding, a cadre and a structuring suited to the changing world, the transforming Middle East and the reality of Turkey"; and showing that those left outside in the history of modernisation "can govern Turkey".

This transformation is important from three angles.

First, the name. The concept of "democratic republic" is a concept Öcalan developed in his writings of the last twenty years. In place of the exclusionary structure of the nation-state, a conception of a republic in which different identities, communities and local self-governments exist together. The carrying of this concept in the party's name or in the movement's name shows that DEM's ideological centre will from now on rest more openly on Öcalan's paradigm.

Second, the emphasis on "movement". Not a party, a movement. This brings the HDK experience to mind: a roof that covers a wide social section, beyond the party. But its difference from the HDK is that this time the ideological frame of the roof has been determined from the start.

Third, "being a candidate to govern". This claim is the claim that the oppressed of Turkey can govern the country, and from the point of view of socialists it is extremely valuable. But the same claim also brings with it the question of with what class programme and with what alliances it will be governed. We return to this question in the sections "From a united party to a single agenda" and "A deep class analysis".

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THE VALUE OF THE DEM PARTY FOR TURKEY

Before passing to the criticism, let us give the due. As we did in the TİP dossier, a criticism that does not see what a party has added to Turkey is not a criticism, it is a prejudice.

It carried a people's political existence for thirty-five years

The Kurdish people's political representation has lived on the shoulders of this tradition since 1990. Nine parties, hundreds of arrested members of parliament and mayors, thousands of arrested cadres. In the 1990s hundreds of members of these parties were killed in unsolved murders. To secure, by paying this price, that a people's voice be heard in Parliament, in the municipality, in the street, is one of the heaviest pages of Turkey's history of democracy.

It insistently defended a political solution to the armed conflict

This tradition, for decades, even in the periods when the war was at its hottest, defended that the problem had to be solved by political and peaceful paths. This attitude was kept despite the pressure both of the state and of those in favour of continuing the conflict. If today's process has a ground, it was this tradition that prepared that ground most.

It applied women's equality at the institutional level

The co-chair system is an institutional equality that no other party in Turkish politics has applied. Equality between women and men, from the chair to the mayoralty, from the provincial organisation to the parliamentary lists. It is not a coincidence that the first things the trustees closed in the municipalities of the region were the women's counselling centres, the women's cooperatives and the shelters. This experience is an example and a measure for all the progressive movements of Turkey.

The experience of local democracy and of municipalism

People's assemblies, city councils, municipal cooperatives, municipal services in Kurdish and in many languages. These experiences are among the most concrete examples in Turkey of the discussion of participatory local government that we took up in the guide Taking Part in Local Government. The trustees' liquidation of these experiences shows how dangerous they were found.

It opened a place in Parliament for the Turkish left

The HDP lists, since 2015, have given many components of the Turkish left the possibility of entering Parliament. If socialist speeches from the rostrum can be made in Parliament today, an important part of the path to this was opened by this alliance. We will discuss the inequalities of this relation below, but we cannot ignore the possibility itself.

It took LGBTİ+ rights, the Alevis, the Armenians, ecology into its programme

There is no other mass party in Turkey that openly defends LGBTİ+ rights, that carries Armenian and Assyrian members of parliament into Parliament, that puts ecology at the centre of its programme. Hatimoğulları's words against the "My Family Is Safe" operations, "Neither the family is safe, nor any of us", show that this line continues today too.

It is carrying the price of the process

If the process is advancing today, it is DEM that is paying its political price most. To continue saying "peace" inside a process coded with the name "a Turkey without terror", to carry its own base's anger and suspicion, to be squeezed between Qandil and Ankara, to answer the criticisms of left and democratic circles — all of these are a heavy load.

In short: The DEM Party is the greatest mass organisation in Turkey of the struggle against national oppression, of women's equality, and of local democracy. Every criticism made without granting this is incomplete. But the way to be able to protect this value is to speak openly of the weaknesses below.

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FROM A UNITED PARTY TO A SINGLE AGENDA: THE CRITICISM OF NARROWING

This is where the dossier stands. For that reason we write openly and directly.

A reminder of a claim

The HDP was not founded in 2012 only as the Kurds' party. It was founded with the claim of being the united party of all the oppressed of Turkey. When in 2015 it rose to 13 percent with the slogan "we will not let you become president", the power behind it was the meeting of a people's national demands with the Gezi generation's demands for freedom, with the Alevis' demands for equal citizenship, with the demands of women and of workers. In the HDP's election declarations the minimum wage, the abolition of subcontracting, the right to strike, severance pay, ecology, women's equality, the mother tongue, the cemevis, the abolition of the compulsory religion lesson stood side by side.

This was not only a programme, it was a claim: the solution of the Kurdish question cannot be separated from the democratisation of Turkey; nor the democratisation of Turkey from the solution of the Kurdish question.

What is on the table today?

Now let us look at today. What are DEM's demands relating to the peace process that have reached the public? When Bakırhan's Evrensel interview, the Diyarbakır provincial-congress speech, the General Assembly speech, Tayip Temel's statement of 18 August and the party's process statements are read together, this list comes out:

• The "recognition of Öcalan's law", "free conditions of work and communication", his working "in the capacity of coordinator" on the Subcommittee on Disarmament and Strategic Coordination, press and civil-society visits to İmralı.
• Legal guarantee, status, a mechanism for the return of those who lay down arms.
• The release of the party's arrested politicians and of the prisoners within the scope of the framework law — in Temel's words, "four thousand people".
• The lifting of the trustees.
• A "democratic constitution" — as a heading whose inside has not yet been filled.

These demands are legitimate. We belittle none of them. A prisoner's access to conditions of communication and of work is a right; the return of elected mayors to their posts is the minimum of democracy; the freedom of political prisoners is the debt of the law.

But now let us look at those left outside the list.

Those not at the table

• Can Atalay. A member of parliament about whom the Constitutional Court has twice ruled a rights violation, whose seat Parliament stripped despite these rulings, who was elected among the ruins of the Hatay earthquake.
• Osman Kavala and the Gezi prisoners. Inside, despite the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights.
• The peace academics. Hundreds of academics dismissed for saying "we will not be a party to this crime", who ten years later still cannot return to the university. Those who want peace.
• Those dismissed by decree-law. Tens of thousands of public employees.
• The defendants in the HDK case. Journalists, academics, artists who had taken part in the HDP's founding congress — those detained in February 2025, inside the peace process.
• Those dismissed from the profession despite being acquitted, like İkra Avcı.
• The right to strike. The strikes "postponed", that is, banned, by decisions of the Council of Ministers and of the President in the last ten years.
• The minimum wage and pensions. As Ali Şekeroğlu, who lost his life in the pensioners' action in front of the Constitutional Court in Ankara, wrote on his placard: "Not for money, for our honour."
• The five hundred thousand citizens whose savings evaporated in the fund plunder.
• The LGBTİ+ citizens taken from their homes at night in the My Family Is Safe operations.
• The closing of T24, the Deniz Göktaş case, and the freedom of the press.
• Education in the mother tongue. Article 42 of the Constitution.
• Law no. 2911 on Meetings and Demonstrations, and the wide definition of "terror" in the Law on the Fight against Terrorism.

DEM made a statement on almost all of these headings. Hatimoğulları objected to My Family Is Safe and to the fund plunder; Bakırhan defined the fund plunder in the interview as a problem of "Bread, Dignity and a Future"; the party's members of parliament carried Atalay's photograph into Parliament. But none of these headings has a place as a condition on the bargaining table of the process. Making a statement and setting a condition are not the same thing. The first is an attitude; the second is a use of power.

How the power is being used

Here we come to the real question. DEM is, for the first time in its history, in a decisive position in the regime's constitutional arithmetic. The only bloc that can close the vote gap required for a constitutional amendment that would make Erdoğan's standing again possible is the DEM group. The framework law passed with a record consensus that the AKP and the MHP could not pass on their own, and the carrying leg of this consensus was DEM. The government now wants "the consensus in the framework law to be carried to the constitution".

This is the greatest bargaining power an opposition party in Turkey has had in the last twenty years.

On what is this power being spent? Let us look at the sentence Bakırhan said in Diyarbakır on 27 September: "For the first time in a hundred years the Kurds are not on the menu, they are at the table." This sentence is historically true and important. But the next sentence is this: for İmralı, the government should "open the door, let the press and a civil-society organisation go" (bianet).

To want the door of İmralı opened is legitimate. But the same insistence is not shown for the door of Silivri. The prison door of a member of parliament whom the Constitutional Court has twice called a "rights violation" is not a condition at the table of the process. A party sitting at the table contents itself with mentioning the names of those left outside the table.

A more striking example: in the General Assembly debates of the framework law, Bakırhan spoke in DEM's name. The parts of the speech that reached the press tell the historical injustice, the sentence "For a hundred years you were told the fear that 'we will be divided'. Yet the thing that brought this country closest to division was the conflict itself", and, with the metaphor "a foundation on its own is not a house", the continuation of democratisation (Oksijen; sol.org.tr). In these reports Atalay's name is absent. The one who, in the same debates, put Atalay in front of the law as a measure came from another party: Umut Akdoğan, the New Party's member of parliament for Ankara, said "Demirtaş should return home, Can Atalay should come to Parliament", and said that alongside the burying of the guns, democracy absolutely had to be strengthened (BirGün). Three days later, the names carried into the headline of the statement of DEM spokesperson Ayşegül Doğan were Demirtaş and Yüksekdağ: "They should not be kept inside one second more" (Evrensel). That the party carrying peace left, in these critical days, a member of parliament held inside despite a Constitutional Court ruling to other parties' rostrums, however small it looks, is the sign of an order of priority.

Eight days later, when the law was published in the Official Gazette, DEM deputy co-chair Tayip Temel said that with the law "four thousand people would be released", and that Demirtaş and Yüksekdağ too would come out under the law; of Atalay he said "Can Atalay cannot stay inside, Bekir Kaya cannot stay inside" (Artı Gerçek). This sentence shows that Atalay's situation was seen not as a part of the process, but as the spontaneous result of an optimistic atmosphere the process would create: "when the guns are laid down, he will come out too." Fifty-six days later none of the four thousand people came out; Demirtaş, Yüksekdağ, Atalay are inside.

Can Atalay: the most basic application of the constitution

We see the Can Atalay matter as a litmus test. Let us explain why.

Article 153 of the Constitution is clear: "The decisions of the Constitutional Court are published immediately in the Official Gazette, and bind the legislative, executive and judicial organs, the administrative authorities, and natural and legal persons." For Atalay the Constitutional Court ruled a rights violation twice. The local court and the Court of Cassation did not recognise these rulings. On 30 January 2024 Parliament read out that Atalay's seat had been stripped despite these rulings. Today, two years and eight months later, Atalay is still in Silivri. On 1 October, as Parliament opened, he began a 24-hour hunger strike: "The knife has now reached the bone" (Euronews).

This is the proof that even the most minimal condition of a state of law in Turkey — the application of the decisions of the constitution's own court — has disappeared. Atalay's situation is not the personal file of a socialist member of parliament; it is the definition of the regime's constitutional character.

Now think: a party says "law", "a democratic constitution", "peace is made lasting by law". It demands the "recognition of Öcalan's law". It says that those who return will return "to a ground whose law, status and guarantee have been determined". But it does not make the application of the Constitutional Court's decisions — that is, the most naked, the most basic, the most undisputed principle of law — a precondition of the process.

This is a contradiction. And the meaning of this contradiction is this: Law is being demanded not as a universal principle but as a selective item of bargaining. Law for our own prisoners; good wishes for the others.

In the interview, answering Özel, Bakırhan says this: "The freedom of Demirtaş, of Figen Yüksekdağ, of Can Atalay and of the political prisoners is a matter of law. Mr Öcalan's role in the peace process and his conditions of work are the running process's own heading." This distinction says everything. Öcalan's position is "the process's own heading"; Atalay is a "matter of law" — that is, outside the process, the business of the courts, that is, of the very courts that are keeping Atalay inside. Bakırhan answered Özel by saying "not the residence, the position". Let us ask with the same word: What is Atalay's position? Is it inside the process, or outside? On the table, or under it?

The honest answer to this question is this: Atalay is outside the table. And the one keeping him outside the table is not only the government, but also the side that sits at the table and does not put his name as a condition.

The root of the narrowing

Where does this narrowing come from? It has three roots.

A strategy centred on the leadership. The process was started from İmralı, and DEM's whole strategy is defined, in Bakırhan's expression, on the axis of Öcalan's political leadership. In this frame the first agenda of the process naturally becomes Öcalan's position. The others can find a place only to the extent that they do not clash with this agenda. Every demand that could increase the tension with the government — Atalay, Kavala, the right to strike, My Family Is Safe — is pushed to the second plan in the name of "not putting the process at risk".

The separation of the national agenda from the class agenda. DEM's programmatic frame is built on "democratic society" and "democratic nation". In this frame the solution of the national question is a matter of negotiation, and class problems are subjects of general opposition. The negotiating table has been set for the national question; class problems have been left to the congress rostrums. The HDP's claim of 2015, that is, that the two cannot be separated, has in practice been abandoned.

The price of accommodation with the regime. The process is running with the Erdoğan–Bahçeli bloc. A party negotiating with this bloc has difficulty using its own power fully against the attacks this bloc conducts against the rest of the opposition. Absolute nullity against the New Party, My Family Is Safe, T24 — all are condemned, but none is set as a condition heavy enough for it to be said "if these continue, we leave the table". Because the price of leaving the table is the suspension of its own agenda.

The historical possibility that was missed

We do not say this as a moral accusation. We are naming the results of a political preference.

The bargaining power in DEM's hand was a historical possibility for the democratisation of Turkey. A party holding the key to the constitutional arithmetic could have said this:

"We will support no constitutional amendment before the Constitutional Court's decisions are applied, before Can Atalay and Selahattin Demirtaş are free, before the trustee regime is constitutionally banned, before the right to strike is guaranteed, before the peace academics and those dismissed by decree-law return to their jobs, before Article 42 is changed."

This sentence would have joined the Kurdish people's demands with the demands of all the oppressed of Turkey. It would have brought to life again the HDP's claim of 2015. It would have made peace the common work of Turkish society, not of a party — exactly as Bakırhan wants when he says "peace is not DEM's business alone". It would have closed the distance of the intellectuals, of the Alevis, of the socialists, of the unions. Because instead of saying to them "support us", it would have said "your demands are at the table too".

This sentence was not formed. So long as it is not formed, peace carries the risk of working not as the easing of a people's forty-year pain, but as an instrument of a regime's reproducing itself.

A distinction: the people and the party leadership

While making this criticism we have to emphasise a distinction once more. The Kurdish people's demand for peace and the DEM leadership's bargaining strategy are not the same thing. The millions of Kurdish labourers who want peace in Diyarbakır, in Cizre, in Esenyurt, in Adana are right in this demand, and we are on their side. Our criticism is of the squeezing of this legitimate demand into a narrow agenda, of the dropping from the table of the general demands of the democratic struggle, and of the narrowing, as a result, of peace's social base.

The Kurdish people's interest is in the democratisation of Turkey. The democratisation of Turkey cannot be thought separately from Atalay's coming out of Silivri, from the recognition of the right to strike, from those dismissed by decree-law returning to their jobs. The HDP once said this. Today we are reminding it.

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THE APPROACH TO THE OTHER CLASS PARTIES: FROM PARTNERSHIP TO TUTELAGE

DEM's relation with Turkey's socialist parties took a new form after the HDK withered. Let us follow this relation moment by moment; because every sentence that looks like a single slip, when put side by side, forms a pattern.

2023: the single-list imposition

The Labour and Freedom Alliance was an alliance that the HDP, TİP, EMEP, the EHP, the TÖP and the SMF founded for the 2023 elections. Saying that in the election law's new method of calculation separate lists would lead to a loss of representation, the HDP insisted that all the components enter the election from the Green Left Party lists. TİP and EMEP wanted to enter with their own lists (Diken).

When TİP announced its decision to enter with its own lists, the reaction was harsh. Gültan Kışanak said that without a common list "this alliance is no longer an electoral alliance". Demirtaş called on all socialists to vote for the Green Left lists "in this election, in which even a single seat in parliament will determine our future". Erkan Baş said that TİP would enter only in the provinces where it saw the potential to elect a member of parliament, and that it took as a principle not to harm the opposition (Medyascope).

The electoral arithmetic can be argued. But the question of principle is this: In an alliance, do the small components have the right to exist with their own identities, with their own lists? The HDP's answer was "they do not". The alliance was defined not as the equal participation of the components, but as participation in the big partner's list.

2024: a scolding of a component party

Two days before the local elections of 31 March 2024, the SYKP, one of DEM's founding components, made a statement in Istanbul indirectly calling on voters to support İmamoğlu so that the AKP–MHP bloc would be defeated. The answer of Meral Danış Beştaş, DEM's candidate for co-mayor of Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality: "A component party's making a public statement in this way does not conform to the law of the alliance" (BirGün).

There is an ironic detail here: the SYKP was the party of which Tülay Hatimoğulları, who was then DEM's co-chair, had been co-chair between 2016 and 2018. If a component's announcing its own political assessment is counted "contrary to the law of the alliance", the law of the alliance has turned into a rule of discipline that silences the components' voices.

2025–2026: the process, and the allies who were not informed

When the peace process began, the HDK's former components and the partners of the Labour and Freedom Alliance were not included in the decision processes at any stage of the process. The content of the İmralı meetings, the direction of the commission, the draft of the framework law — the socialist parties learned these from leaks and from the press, like the public. As we stated in our Open Questions piece, TİP and EMEP said a conditional "yes" to the law, but they were not at a table that would secure the fulfilment of their conditions. Erkan Baş said he had "objections to all the articles" of the law and still said yes; İskender Bayhan of EMEP defined the process as "hostage politics".

This is not only an inequality, it is an exclusion. In the same process DEM itself complained of not being informed of the draft text: in July party administrators were saying "at the moment we too have no information on the content" (T24, Gökçer Tahincioğlu). A party that is disturbed when it itself is not informed did not show the same care in informing its own allies.

September 2026: "the ones we picked up off the street"

On 2 September, 53 Alevi intellectuals published a declaration against Öcalan's mentioning the Yavuz Selim–Idris-i Bitlisi alliance as a positive historical reference: "While we move away from the climate of violence arising from the Kurdish question, we accept no language that will cause the Alevis anxiety" (BirGün).

This comparison was presenting as a positive model the alliance the Ottomans built with the Kurdish beys against the Safavids in the 16th century, that is, the political architecture of a period in which the Kızılbaş-Alevi communities in Anatolia were suppressed by massacre. The Alevis' anxiety was historically grounded.

Bakırhan's answer on a television programme: "I don't know what intellectual identity the names we picked up off the street and made into members of parliament have" and "if criticising the Kurdish Movement is being an intellectual, then, pardon me, that was yesterday" (Cumhuriyet). A personal insult directed at one of those who signed the declaration also reached the press. The next day Bakırhan stepped back, saying that his words meant "opening a field in politics".

There are three separate problems in these sentences:

• A seat in parliament is being seen as a favour. Yet those members were elected by the people's vote. Taking a place on a party's list does not create a debt to that party's centre; it creates a responsibility to that party's electorate.
• Criticism is being coded as disloyalty. The sentence "if criticising the Kurdish Movement is being an intellectual, that was yesterday" says that criticism is not a legitimate political act but a form of betrayal.
• A people's historical anxiety is being belittled. The Alevis' reaction to the Yavuz Selim reference is not an "intellectual caprice"; it is the collective memory of an oppression lasting centuries.

In the Evrensel interview Bakırhan says "a politics that cannot say its shortcoming cannot grow". This sentence is true. To give it its due, an apology is needed first of all for this speech.

September 2026: "there is a circle"

And the reproach in the Evrensel interview: "There is a circle whose approaches we have difficulty understanding." Bakırhan divides those who approach the process critically into "opponents of the process" and "those who carry anxiety"; he says that those who carry anxiety must "put the question mark in the right place"; the right place is not to place it "behind peace, or behind the democratic solution's being based on negotiation". And he adds: "Everyone except those who are against peace and against the Kurds, whether they have a question and an anxiety or not, should see the negotiation process as the lever of the democratic struggle."

Here a party is telling other political subjects what they should see, and how. The "right place" of the question mark is being determined by a centre. The mood of "should see" is not an invitation, it is an instruction. Even those who have a question and an anxiety are obliged to accept that the process is a lever. Those who do not accept approach the category of "against peace and against the Kurds".

But there is a counter-example too

To be fair, let us record a counter-example too. When in June 2026 Erkan Baş stirred an argument with his words that uniting around a presidential candidate whose mother tongue is Kurdish could be difficult, Bakırhan's answer was measured and unifying: "The reality of the hurt here exists, and this cannot be belittled", but "we should all stay away from discourses that will open one another's wounds" and "this argument is closed for us" (T24). This answer was an answer that recognised a feeling a left party's leader had wounded, and that put the common struggle first. The exact opposite of the answer Bakırhan gave the Alevi intellectuals.

This contrast tells us this: the DEM leadership can build a unifying language. The problem is not capacity, it is preference. When the criticism comes "from outside" — from the leader of another party — a measured language is used; when it comes "from inside" — from people elected on the party's own lists — the language of tutelage comes into play.

What falls to the class parties

It would be unjust to close this section by criticising only DEM. The socialist parties have their own share too.

TİP and EMEP said a conditional "yes" to the process, but they did not turn their conditions into a programme of struggle. On 1 October TİP boycotted the opening of Parliament; a meaningful attitude. But this attitude did not turn into a common plan of action that also covered the other left parties and the unions. The socialist left split in the peace process between "yes, but" and "no, because", and could not unite around an independent list of demands.

One reason for DEM's language of tutelage is this too: it does not see in front of it an organised socialist power that can impose its own agenda. For the HDK's idea of an alliance among equals to be able to be founded again, the socialist left first needs to build a unity among equals inside itself.

Partnership, or tutelage?

Let us put all these examples side by side:

Moment	DEM's attitude	The character of the relation
The 2023 election	Insistence on a single list for TİP and EMEP; "no longer an alliance" to the decision for a separate list	The refusal of the component's identity
March 2024	"Does not conform to the law of the alliance" to the SYKP's independent statement	The disciplining of the component's voice
The 2025–2026 process	The allies not being included in the decision processes	A monopoly of information
June 2026	A measured and unifying language in the Erkan Baş argument	Partnership
2 September 2026	"The ones we picked up off the street", "that was yesterday", to the Alevi intellectuals	Patronage, and a demand for loyalty
5 October 2026	"There is a circle"; "everyone should see negotiation as a lever"	The language of instruction

One of the six moments is partnership, five are tutelage. From a Marxist point of view an alliance is built among equals; a relation in which one side tells the other what it should think is not an alliance, it is patronage. If DEM's Democratic Republic Movement is really to be a wide movement "candidate to govern Turkey", it first needs to be rid of this language of patronage.

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A DEEP CLASS ANALYSIS: THE FIELDS THAT NEED TO BE STRENGTHENED

There is "society" and "the state", there is no class

The basic concepts of DEM's programmatic language today are these: democratic society, democratic nation, democratic republic, social contract, self-government. The common point of these concepts is that they position society against the state. The state is a structure that excludes society, that centralises it, that is monist; the solution is the strengthening of society's capacity to govern itself.

This approach has a progressive side: the criticism of the centralist, monist, militarist Turkish nation-state. But from the point of view of a class analysis it has a serious gap: the question of whose state the state is is not asked. In Marxist theory the state is not a structure standing "outside" society, it is the product of society's division into classes and the instrument of the ruling class. Society is not a homogeneous whole, it is the field of clashing class interests. Inside the thing you call "society" there is both the worker who falls from the scaffold and the contractor who owns that scaffold.

This gap produces concrete results. For example: when peace comes to the region, into whose hands will the public tenders, the energy investments, the agricultural lands, the mining licences pass? The language of "democratic society" does not ask this question; because it does not divide society into classes. The language of "self-government" does not determine whose self-government it will be — the property owners', or the labourers'.

In the interview the word worker appears twice; the word capital does not appear at all. This is not enough to assess a party's programme by a single interview. But it shows a tendency.

Negotiation: the fetishism of the table

In Bakırhan's interview the metaphor of the "table" repeats constantly: the table's not breaking up, the different expectations at the table, the meaning of the table. Negotiation is a legitimate way of solving a problem; the ending of a war happens only by negotiation. We accept this.

But it is dangerous for negotiation to become a fetish. A fetish is the turning of a relation into an object. The fetishism of negotiation is the reduction to the table itself of the social relations of power — the relation of who is organised, who is strong, who has something to lose. What will be won at the table is determined not by the table but by the balance of power outside the table. What brought apartheid to an end in South Africa was not only the negotiation between De Klerk and Mandela, but the COSATU strikes, the township uprisings and the international boycott that made this negotiation necessary. In Northern Ireland the Good Friday Agreement gained legitimacy not only at the table but by the agreement's being put to a referendum.

In the process in Turkey there is no organised social power outside the table. The working class does not take a place in the process as a subject; the unions are institutions that only make statements of support in the process. For this reason the key remaining in the government's hand at the table is being tried to be balanced by the other side's call to patience. Patience is not power.

The centrality of the leadership, and inner-party democracy

According to Bakırhan the process is advancing on the axis of Öcalan's political leadership. This is a finding of fact; it is true that the process was started from İmralı and that its direction is determined from there.

But a party's defining its whole strategy on the axis of a single leader's leadership is a serious problem from the point of view of inner-party democracy. The co-chairs' taking all of the 535 votes at the congress can be read as a show of unity; but it can also be read as a lack of argument. No alternative list, no opposing voice, no difference of votes. In a healthy mass party strategic decisions are discussed in the base, different views are voted, minority views go on the record.

The clearest example of this problem is the answer given to the Alevi intellectuals; we take it up in detail in the section "The approach to the other class parties".

In Lenin's understanding of the party the word "democratic" is as important as "centralism": freedom in discussion, unity in action. Where discussion is not free, unity of action turns into a chain of command.

The regime of secrecy, and becoming social

Bakırhan accepts "the process's not becoming social at a sufficient level", and says that this should not be tied to a single reason. But one reason is very clear: the process is running in secret. The content of the İmralı meetings is learned from leaks; the draft of the law is discussed through leaked texts; what the Monitoring Board talked about is not known; the composition of the boards is not announced.

Society cannot be expected to support a thing it does not know. Murat Sevinç's answer to Erol's words that "the intellectuals are not giving enough support" was exactly in its place: "Is what is expected of the intellectuals that they explain their views, or that they support the determined frame unconditionally?" (Kısa Dalga). So was Ruşen Çakır's finding: social support cannot be secured with the approach "trust us, don't interfere with the rest".

The only path of becoming social is transparency. DEM can and should demand transparency from the government on this; but sharing with society as much as it itself knows is also in its own hand. In the interview Bakırhan says of the returns "we too do not have in hand a picture that has been settled". This is an honest sentence. But with the same honesty this too can be said: What do we know, what do we not know, what are we demanding, what will we not accept? So long as the answers to these four questions are not shared with the public, becoming social remains a call.

The demand for law, and the silence on property

DEM's demands relating to the process are in the main legal: the recognition of Öcalan's law, Demirtaş's release, the application of the rulings of the Constitutional Court and of the European Court of Human Rights, the lifting of the trustees, legal guarantee for those who return. All of these are just and urgent demands.

But peace also has an economic content, and on this content DEM's voice is very weak.

The Development Road. The great transport and trade corridor project running from Basra to the Turkish border, and supported by Iraq, Turkey, Qatar and the UAE, wants a Kurdish geography without guns. Development for whom is this project? Which construction companies, which logistics monopolies, which energy companies will gain? How will the peasants' lands along the corridor be expropriated?

The reconstruction of the region. Reconstruction tenders in Syria, in Iraq and in the southeast of Turkey are a great field of capital accumulation. Remember how the city centres of Sur, Cizre and Nusaybin, destroyed in 2015–16, were rebuilt under the name of "urban transformation": the old residents could not return, and in their place TOKİ blocks and commercial areas were built. After peace, will this model be repeated?

The trustee plunder. Ahmet Türk's sentence "trustee means plunder" names the property dimension of the problem rightly. The 57 immovable properties put up for sale in Mardin are the question of to whom public wealth is being transferred. The peace process should take onto the agenda the return of the public assets that changed hands in the trustee periods.

Agriculture and water. The dams, the hydroelectric plants, the mine fields, the agricultural lands in the region. How will the ownership and the use of these resources be regulated after peace?

None of these questions is in Bakırhan's interview. None of these questions is in the framework law. None of these questions is in the parts of the commission report that reached the public. Yet it is precisely these questions that will determine what peace will mean for the labourers. When the demand for law is not joined with the demand for property, peace becomes an opportunity for capital and a waiting room for labour.

The constitution: an ajar door

We saw it in the interview section: Bakırhan says that the institutional view on the constitution has not yet been formed, that the position of principle is "a democratic constitution", and that he says "it is not right to squeeze it into the argument over electing and being elected".

This attitude is producing an uncertainty at a very critical moment. Erdoğan's speech at the opening of Parliament on 1 October gave a wide place to the constitution; Kurtulmuş said "Parliament's priority is a new constitution"; from the government side calls are coming for "the ground of consensus in the framework law to be secured for the constitution too".

The meaning of this call is clear: the ground of consensus of the peace process is wanted to be carried to the constitutional package. And this package, as we showed in Whose Contract Is the Constitution?, is a package that makes the powers of the executive permanent, that preserves the first four articles, that could open the way for Erdoğan to stand again.

How DEM approaches this package will be the most critical test of the process. If DEM thinks of exchanging the support to be given to the constitutional package for concrete steps in the peace process — Demirtaş's release, the lifting of the trustees, education in the mother tongue, the law's entering into force — this will be a much heavier repetition of the 2010 "not enough, but yes". Because this time the price of a constitutional package will be the holding of peace itself hostage to an executive regime.

Here we want to make a proposal to DEM: when it explains its institutional view on the constitution, let it set as preconditions the limiting of the powers of the executive, the constitutional banning of the trustee regime, the changing of Article 42 of the Constitution, and the taking of the right to strike under constitutional guarantee. So long as "a democratic constitution" remains an abstract call, a "democratic" label can be stuck on every constitution the government will write.

The regional equation: in which camp?

Bakırhan assesses the developments in Syria as "generally positive". The dissolution of the SDF, integration into the Syrian army, Mazlum Abdi's new post in Damascus. These are the signs of a great transformation in the Kurdish movement's regional strategy.

But the geopolitical frame of this transformation needs to be looked at. The US–Iran agreement, the Turkey–Iraq agreements, the new regime in Damascus's relation with Turkey, Iran's demands on PJAK. For decades the Kurdish movement tried to open a field among the contradictions of the great powers in the region. Today a kind of understanding is forming among these powers, and the common denominator of this understanding is a Kurdish geography without guns.

This can be a peace for the Kurdish people. But it can also be the understanding of the interests of the capital and of the states in the region. What the workers, the peasants, the women, the young of the region will gain and what they will lose in this understanding is not clear. In the Closed Door piece we had said "there are three bourgeois subjects at the table, the only thing not at the table is the labourers". We can widen this finding today to the regional scale: at the table of regional peace there are states and armed structures; there are no labourers.

The Kurdish-education actions in Rojava are very important from this angle: after the integration, society itself is going into the street for the protection of rights that have been won. Bakırhan qualifies this as "a matter Rojava will talk through and decide inside itself". But these actions are a living example that what is won at the table has to be protected in the street.

The test of inclusiveness: Alevis, women, workers

In the interview Bakırhan defines the aim of the Democratic Republic Movement as showing that the excluded, whom he counts as "in some cases the Kurds, in some cases the Alevis, in every case women, the young, the poor, the workers", can govern Turkey.

The test of this claim is given at the moments when these sections can say their own words.

The Alevis spoke: the declaration of 53 intellectuals. We saw the answer given in the section "The approach to the other class parties".

Women are speaking: women's organisations are asking that the process be assessed with a woman's eye, and what peace means for women. Despite the co-chair system, these questions are not at the centre of the process.

The workers are not speaking. Because there is no platform on which they can speak.

Inclusiveness is built by a process in which those to be included can say their own words, in which those words are listened to, and in which they affect the decisions. Otherwise "inclusiveness" means a centre's inviting others into the frame it has itself defined.

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"WHILE THERE WERE GUNS, THE PROBLEM WAS THE GUN": THE REPROACH TO THE LEFT, AND OUR ANSWER

The criticism Bakırhan directed at the left in the interview is one of the most important headings of argument in this dossier. We set a separate part aside for it, because this reproach is a reproach we too need to think about.

What is the reproach?

Let us read Bakırhan's words once more:

"For long years there were circles that argued that the obstacle in front of the struggle of labour and of democracy was the PKK's armed struggle. Today the PKK has announced that it has dissolved itself and ended the armed struggle. Did the thing these circles had wanted for years not come about? But from them we felt neither a joy nor a sentence of responsibility. On the contrary, the objections rose. While there were guns, the problem was the gun. When the gun was laid down, the problem became peace."

And he adds: "Peace is not democracy itself. The laying down of arms does not democratise the country in a day; no one is claiming this either. But one of the heaviest obstacles in front of politics is being lifted. Both the struggle of labour and the struggle for democracy can now walk in a wider field. Whoever belittles this possibility will also have belittled the thing they defended for years."

Where the reproach is just

This reproach is just for a section of the Turkish left.

A section of the Turkish left, especially its nationalist and Kemalist-inclined sections, for decades defined the Kurdish question as a "terror problem", showed the armed struggle as the obstacle in front of the struggle of labour and of democracy, and qualified the Kurdish movement as "the tool of imperialism". These sections, while the guns fall silent today, are objecting by saying "this process is an imperialist project", "the country is being divided", "an AKP–PKK alliance". Bakırhan's sentence "while there were guns the problem was the gun, when the gun was laid down the problem became peace" catches this section's inconsistency exactly.

The root of this section's inconsistency is its separating the national question from the class question. A left that defines the ruling official nationalism as "patriotism" and an oppressed people's demand for equal rights as "separatism" defends the exact opposite of what Marx said on Ireland and of what Lenin said on the right of nations to self-determination. Marx wrote that the English working class could not secure its own liberation so long as it continued to crush Ireland. Lenin too, in 1914, in the concepts of his own period, wrote that the socialists of the ruling nation had to defend unconditionally the equal rights of the oppressed nation. A left that forgets these principles deserves Bakırhan's reproach.

We are not in this section

But the target of this reproach does not seem to be a single section. The context of the interview — the argument over intellectuals, the Alevi declaration, the perception of "opponent of the process" — suggests that the reproach covers a wider field. For this reason let us say our own attitude openly:

We never argued that the obstacle in front of the struggle of labour and of democracy was the PKK's armed struggle. We argued that the obstacle was the order of capital and its state. We argued that at the root of the Kurdish question lay the legal non-recognition, for long years, of Kurdish and of the Kurdish identity; Law no. 2932, which banned publication in Kurdish in 1983, is the best-known example of this. We never saw armed violence as a path of solution; we argued that the problem could be solved only by political and peaceful paths, on the basis of equal citizenship.

We see the silencing of the guns as a gain. We said it openly in the section "A return to our earlier pieces": in our August pieces we did not bring this forward enough; this was a shortcoming. The silencing of the guns is the lifting of one of the greatest obstacles in front of the common organisation of Turkish and Kurdish labourers. The conflict was the most effective instrument for dividing the class along national lines; for forty years the labouring families of this country, whatever language they spoke, gave their children to the soil. The ending of this is a historical possibility from the point of view of the class struggle.

Our objection is not to peace, it is to the content of peace. And this objection is an objection Bakırhan shares too: "Peace is not democracy itself." This is exactly what we are saying. Peace is a possibility; whether this possibility turns into a gain depends on who will use this possibility, and how.

"The field widens" is not automatic

Bakırhan's strongest argument is this: "Both the struggle of labour and the struggle for democracy can now walk in a wider field. Whoever belittles this possibility will also have belittled the thing they defended for years."

We agree with this argument — on one condition. The field does not widen of itself. Whether the field of the labour struggle will widen when the guns fall silent depends on who will fill that field. There are two possibilities:

The first possibility: Peace strengthens the government's hegemony. The narrative of "the leader who ended terror", a new constitutional package, standing again, regional investments, development corridors. Capital takes the place of the guns. The Kurdish labourer works now without the fear of a military operation, but for the same wage, with the same insecurity. In this case the "field" has not widened, it has changed hands.

The second possibility: Peace turns into the ground of the common organisation of Turkish and Kurdish labourers. The unions organise in the region; the Kurdish worker and the Turkish worker meet in the same strike; education in the mother tongue, job security, the lifting of the trustees, the right to strike take a place on the same list of demands. In this case the field has really widened.

Which possibility will come about depends on the steps to be taken today. And none of these steps can be taken at the table; all of them are taken outside the table, by organisation.

Not to turn the reproach back, but to ask a common question

We want to answer Bakırhan not with a reproach but with a question:

What will the DEM Party do for peace to turn into a gain for the labourers?

Will it demand the return of the public assets sold in the trustee period? Will it defend the local people's and the workers' right to a say in the reconstruction and development projects in the region? Will it open to argument the class content of the Development Road? Will it set the right to strike, trade-union freedoms, job security as preconditions in the constitutional talks? Will it invite the unions, the left parties, the professional organisations into the process as subjects?

The answers to be given to these questions will fill in Bakırhan's sentence "the struggle of labour can walk in a wider field". We are asking these questions not against peace but for peace. And we are ready to produce the answers to these questions together. In Bakırhan's own words: "The matter passes through bringing the question marks behind these paradoxes and producing the answer together."

We want to put the question mark in the right place. The right place is this: In whose name will the title deed of peace be issued?

Turning the mirror

Let us also read Bakırhan's reproach from the other side. "While there were guns, the problem was the gun. When the gun was laid down, the problem became peace." We can direct this sentence at DEM too: While there were guns, the agenda was peace. When the gun was laid down, why did the agenda not open onto the whole of democracy, and narrow instead to the position of a single man and to our own prisoners?

The silencing of the guns, as Bakırhan says, means the lifting of "one of the heaviest obstacles in front of politics". In that case, in a period when the guns have fallen silent, the agenda of politics should have widened: the right to strike, the minimum wage, pensions, the constitutional state of law, Atalay, Kavala, those dismissed by decree-law, the academics. The reverse happened, the agenda narrowed. This narrowing is the mirror, turned toward DEM, of the criticism Bakırhan directed at the left of "belittling the thing it defended for years": the idea of "the united struggle of all the oppressed of Turkey", which the HDP defended for years, was dropped from the table at the most critical moment of peace.

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TWO TABLES AND OPEN QUESTIONS

The official account and the class reading

The official account	The class reading
"A Turkey without terror"	The reduction of a people's forty-year demand for rights to a security problem
"The distance covered"	Large steps on the side of the gun; standing still on the side of rights
"The MGK determination is awaited"	The key of the law is in the government's pocket; entry into force is an instrument of bargaining
"The ground of consensus should be carried to the constitution"	The holding of peace hostage to the making permanent of an executive regime
"Becoming social is lacking"	The expectation of approval from society under a regime of secrecy
"Development and investment"	The opening of a geography without guns to capital accumulation
"The trustee is a temporary measure"	The changing of hands of public assets; the liquidation of the commons
"A democratic constitution"	A label that can be stuck on every constitution so long as it is not filled in

What was said in the interview, and what was not

What was said	What was not said
The framework law opened the legal door	Why is the key of the door in the MGK's hand?
A technical delay should not turn into a political postponement	What is the measure of the postponement? After which date will we say "postponement"?
Öcalan is expected to work in the capacity of coordinator	What is the party's own strategic autonomy?
The first returns before winter	To what jobs, for what wages, with what guarantees will those who return come back?
A democratic constitution is necessary	Will a yes be said to a constitution open to Erdoğan's standing again?
Demirtaş's release is the debt of the law	Why was this debt not written into the law?
Atalay's freedom "is a matter of law"	If Öcalan's position is the heading of the process, why is the application of the Constitutional Court's decisions not?
The pressures reduce confidence in peace	Are the pressures and peace not parts of the same strategy?
Peace is not DEM's business alone	By what mechanism will others join the decision processes?
We had shortcomings	Which shortcomings? Is the answer given to the Alevi intellectuals one of them?
When the gun was laid down, the problem became peace	What is the class content of peace? Who will gain, who will pay?
In the fund plunder the trace of the money is clear	Is finance capital's swallowing of the small saving a "corruption", or a system?
Those excluded can govern Turkey	With what programme, with what property order?

Open questions to the DEM Party

We ask these questions not as an interrogation but as an invitation to think together:

• Can Atalay: Will the application of the Constitutional Court's decisions — that is, Article 153 of the Constitution — be a precondition of DEM's support for the process and for the constitutional talks? If it will not, why?
• The calendar of entry into force: If the MGK determination does not come in December either, what will DEM's attitude be? Which date will determine the line between "technical delay" and "political postponement"?
• The constitution: When DEM's institutional view is announced, will the limiting of the powers of the executive, the constitutional ban on the trustee, the changing of Article 42, and the guarantee of the right to strike take a place as preconditions? Will a "no" be said to an amendment that opens the way for Erdoğan to stand again?
• Those left outside the scope: Will the peace academics, those dismissed by decree-law, the Gezi prisoners, the defendants in the HDK case enter the process's list of demands?
• Demirtaş and Yüksekdağ: On 18 August it had been said that "they will come out under the law". They did not come out. What was the ground of this expectation, and why did it not come about?
• The trustee plunder: Will the return of the public assets sold, transferred, leased in the trustee periods take a place on DEM's list of demands?
• The economy of peace: Does DEM have a programme on the Development Road, the reconstruction tenders, the energy and mining projects? How will the local people's and the workers' right to a say in these projects be guaranteed?
• Return and labour: In whose responsibility is the planning of work, housing, education, health for the participation in social life of those who will return? How will the unions and the professional organisations take a place in this process?
• The Alevis: Will an apology or a correction be made for the words "the ones we picked up off the street"? Will an institutional answer be given to the anxiety the Yavuz Selim–Idris-i Bitlisi comparison created?
• The allies: Will the socialist parties, the unions and the professional organisations give the process "support", or will they join the decision processes as "subjects"? Will the right of the components to speak with their own voice be under guarantee in the Democratic Republic Movement?
• Inner-party democracy: Is a process of argument foreseen at the next congress in which different views, alternative lists, minority motions will take a place?
• Transparency: Will DEM regularly share with the public, as far as it itself knows, the stages of the process, its demands and its red lines?

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CONCRETE TASKS

Dear young comrades, if all this analysis does not turn into an action, it remains only a commentary. Let us recall Marx's eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.

Here are concrete tasks for the months ahead:

Defend peace, ask its content

Do not stand beside any discourse that is against peace. Discourses such as "the country is being divided", "an imperialist project", "an AKP–PKK alliance" are the forms of official nationalism dressed as the left. But while defending peace, do not give up asking its content either. The two attitudes do not exclude one another; they complete one another.

Make visible those left outside the door

Demirtaş, Yüksekdağ, Atalay, Kavala, the prisoners of the Kobani case, the peace academics, those dismissed by decree-law, the public employees liquidated like İkra Avcı. Follow each one's name, situation, legal process. Mention these names on your campus, in your union, in your neighbourhood. The measure of peace is whether those who want peace are free.

Make Can Atalay a condition of peace

Open Atalay's freedom to argument not as a "personal file" but as the legal measure of peace. Defend Article 153 of the Constitution — the decisions of the Constitutional Court bind everyone — as the most minimal condition of the peace process. Ask the same question of every party, including DEM: in a country where the decisions of the Constitutional Court are not applied, which peace law can be a guarantee? Secure that every structure that wants peace is tested by the answer it gives to this question.

Think the HDK idea again

Discuss how an alliance among equals can be built. Why could the HDK not be sustained, what was the share of the socialist components in this, on what principles can a new common ground be built? Have this discussion not only among parties but in the unions, in the workplaces, in the neighbourhoods. Begin not with a common list but with common organisation.

Document the trustee plunder

Document the immovable properties sold, the women's centres closed, the cooperatives cancelled, the tenders changed in the municipalities to which trustees were appointed. This can be an open-source data project: a municipality's list of assets before and after the trustee, the budget items, the tender records. Knowledge is a commons; to know where public wealth has gone is the right of all of us.

Open the economy of peace to argument

The Development Road, the regional investments, the reconstruction tenders, the energy projects. Ask for whom these are. In the universities, in the unions, in the professional chambers, prepare panels, reading groups, reports on the economy of peace. Peace should be the agenda of labour, not of capital.

Put first the common organisation of Turkish and Kurdish workers

In the metropolises, in construction, textiles, courier work, the service sector, Turkish and Kurdish workers are already working side by side. Support union organisation in these workplaces. Bring onto the agenda the conditions of the seasonal agricultural workers. The most concrete gain of peace will be the meeting of the two peoples' labourers in the same union, in the same strike, around the same demand.

Form an independent list of demands in the constitutional process

In the argument over a new constitution, do not content yourselves with saying "yes" or "no" to the government's agenda. Form your own list of demands: the constitutional ban on the trustee, the guarantee of the right to strike, education in the mother tongue, the supervision of the executive, the independence of the judiciary, the abolition of Law no. 2911. Present this list to every party, including DEM.

Listen to the anxieties of the Alevis, of women, of LGBTİ+ people

The peace process cannot advance by sacrificing one section's anxiety to another section's hope. The Alevi intellectuals' declaration, the women's organisations' demands, the operations against LGBTİ+ associations. All of these are part of the process. Inclusiveness is built by a process in which everyone can say their word.

Make the criticism in a comradely way

While criticising the DEM Party, choose the target of your criticism rightly. Do not weigh an oppressed people's mass party in the same scale as the parties of the ruling class. Criticism is a relation; as we discussed in our book "To Criticise in a Comradely Way, to Advance Together" and in the Guide to the Ethics of Revolutionary Discussion, the aim of criticism is not to defeat the one opposite, but to reach what is more true together. In this dossier we tried to do this; we also openly accepted the places we could not do it in our August pieces.

Build your own independent class line

The common denominator of all these tasks is this: in the peace process the working class must have an independent voice. This voice should melt neither inside the government's discourse of "a Turkey without terror", nor only inside the national movement's discourse of "democratic society". It should exist with its own demands, with its own organisations, with its own agenda. As we said in our hegemony piece: counter-hegemony is built not by saying "yes" or "no" to the government's agenda, but by the working class's determining the agenda.

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CLOSE: IN FRONT OF THE DOOR

Dear young comrades,

Perhaps the most beautiful sentence in Bakırhan's interview is this: "No one returns to uncertainty."

This sentence was said for those who will return from the mountain. But it sums up a whole people's history. For a hundred years the Kurdish people lived in uncertainty: the uncertainty of whether their language would be forbidden, the uncertainty of whether their village would be burned, the uncertainty of whether the mayor they elected would stay in office, the uncertainty of whether their son would return from the mountain. And it was not only the Kurds who lived this uncertainty. The workers of this country are living in uncertainty too: the uncertainty of whether their job will be there tomorrow, of whether they will be able to pay the rent, of whether they will fall from the scaffold.

Peace means the ending of one of these uncertainties — of the gun. This is not a small thing. But the other uncertainties are standing in their place. And their ending will not happen at any table, by any MGK decision, by any framework law. Their ending will happen by the common organisation of this country's Turkish, Kurdish, Arab, Alevi, Armenian, Laz, Circassian labourers.

It is not only those who will return from the mountain who are waiting in front of the door. A member of parliament on hunger strike in Silivri is waiting. Academics who have been waiting for ten years at the university door are waiting. Workers waiting for the right to strike at the workplace door are waiting. Mardin, waiting at the municipality door for the mayor it elected, is waiting. If a peace process makes none of these doors a condition, the door it has opened is not everyone's door.

The door has opened. We are in front of the door. Let the house we meet when we go inside be the house we will make. Let its title deed be issued in the name of labour.

Peace lasts only when it is the peace of labour.

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UPDATE

5 October 2026, 14.00 — The piece was written on the day the Bakırhan interview was published in Evrensel. The DEM Party's institutional view on the constitution will be announced "in the days ahead"; the MGK's determination on the framework law, and developments relating to the first returns, are awaited. This section will be updated as these developments come. A regular update will come.

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SOURCES

The main source

• DEM Party co-chair Tuncer Bakırhan spoke to Evrensel: We expect the first returns to begin before winter — Evrensel, Dilan Temiz, 5 October 2026
• Bakırhan: We expect the first returns to begin before winter — Serbestiyet report

Earlier pieces of the Knowledge Commons (the framework-law series)

• What Does the 2026 "Framework Law" Conceal? (9 August 2026)
• The Class Anatomy and Historical Guilt of Those Who Say "Yes" to the Framework Law (10 August 2026)
• A Dialectical Assessment of Can Atalay's Statement on the "Framework Law" (10 August 2026)
• Class Analysis of the Framework Law and Socialist Strategy (11 August 2026)
• A Class Assessment of Mustafa Yalçıner's "Framework Law and Positions" (11 August 2026)
• Rejecting the Ruling Class's Playing Field: The Reality of Hegemony, Passive Revolution, and an Independent Class Line (14 August 2026)
• An Open Invitation to Deniz Zeyrek on the Reality of Hegemony and the Class Horizon (14 August 2026)
• Closed Door, Leaked Text, Hired Mind (28 August 2026)
• The Price of Wanting Peace: The Tenth Year on 1 September (1 September 2026)
• Open Questions on the Peace Process (8 September 2026)
• Who Is Selçuk Mızraklı and Why Was He Kept Inside for Seven Years? (9 September 2026)

Other related pieces of the Knowledge Commons

• Mass or Class? A Dossier on the Workers' Party of Turkey (3 October 2026)
• Whose Contract Is the Constitution? (4 October 2026)
• Parliament Is Opening, but What Is It For? (1 October 2026)
• Whose Family Is Safe? (15 September 2026)
• Taking Part in Local Government — the Guides page

The law, the MGK, and the official process

• The historic bill passed Parliament with the votes of 467 members — T24
• The full text of the bill — bianet
• An 8-article communiqué from the MGK — Hürriyet, 30 September 2026
• The MGK meeting ended, no statement was made in the direction of the framework law's entering into force — bianet
• The joint report the process commission adopted is published on the Grand National Assembly site — 24 Saat
• Hakan Fidan: concrete steps have not taken place — report of 20 September 2026
• Agenda assessment, 9–22 September 2026 — art-izan

Qandil and İmralı statements

• Qandil said "if Öcalan is not free we will not lay down arms" — Halk TV, 18 September 2026
• A new message from İmralı — Takvim report, 29 September 2026

The DEM Party congress and the arguments

• The DEM Party held its congress, the co-chairs were re-elected — Medyascope, 6 September 2026
• The DEM Party held its postponed congress — Euronews
• Bakırhan to the Alevi intellectuals: "The ones we picked up off the street and made members of parliament…" — Cumhuriyet, 2 September 2026
• A Declaration of Alevi Intellectuals from 53 names — BirGün
• Support for peace, or trust in the process? The intellectuals' argument — Kısa Dalga
• Özgür Özel: we would like to speak of Demirtaş's reaching his home — Medyascope, 16 September 2026
• Bakırhan to Özel: the matter is not the residence, it is the position
• An interview with Tuncer Bakırhan — Birikim, Mahir Sargın

Prisoners, trustees, the opposition

• Demirtaş: Selçuk Mızraklı will come out on Tuesday morning — Diken, 5 September 2026
• The Kobani case: 42 years for Demirtaş, 30 years for Yüksekdağ — bianet
• The Kobani case on appeal — bianet
• The term of the trustee in Ahmet Türk's place was extended — Evrensel, 3 July 2026
• The DEM Party mayors to whom trustees were appointed met in Mardin — Halk TV, 30 September 2026
• Ahmet Özer: Bahçeli gave his word four times — Medyascope, 29 April 2026
• Özgür Özel and 91 members of parliament resigned from the CHP — Euronews, 24 July 2026

The co-chairs, the HDK, and the alliance relations

• Who is Tuncer Bakırhan? — bianet
• Siirt co-mayor Bakırhan was arrested — Agos, November 2016
• An Arab, Alevi, Socialist, Feminist Candidate for Parliament — bianet, 2018
• Ertuğrul Kürkçü: the HDK was founded for the peoples to govern themselves — bianet, February 2025
• From taking part in a Zoom meeting to membership of a terror organisation — Serbestiyet
• Demirtaş's message too could not solve the list crisis — Medyascope, 26 January 2023
• TİP entered a reservation to the HDP's proposal to enter the election from a single list — Diken
• Erkan Baş's answer to the separate-list criticisms of Kışanak and Demirtaş — Medyascope, 3 April 2023
• The SYKP pointed to İmamoğlu, Beştaş reacted — BirGün, March 2024
• Tuncer Bakırhan assessed Erkan Baş's words — T24
• Bakırhan spoke in Diyarbakır, Hatimoğulları in Erzurum — bianet, 27 September 2026

The framework law and Can Atalay

• Temel of DEM: 4 thousand people will be released, Can Atalay cannot stay inside — Artı Gerçek, 18 August 2026
• The framework-law bill in the General Assembly, the first 10 articles adopted — Oksijen, 11 August 2026
• Akdoğan of the New Party: "Demirtaş should return home, Can Atalay should come to Parliament" — BirGün
• DEM Party spokesperson Doğan: Demirtaş and Yüksekdağ should not be kept inside one second more — Evrensel, 13 August 2026
• The framework-law bill in the General Assembly: which party gave what message? — sol.org.tr
• The DEM Party's discomfort with the framework law, and what was lived on İmralı — T24, Gökçer Tahincioğlu
• Can Atalay's seat in parliament was stripped — Medyascope, 30 January 2024
• Can Atalay began a 24-hour hunger strike in prison — Euronews, 1 October 2026
• The Can Atalay protest at the opening of Parliament: TİP did not attend, DEM carried his photograph — Cumhuriyet, 1 October 2026

The region

• Mazlum Abdi: the SDF has been dissolved — Diken, 25 August 2026
• Mazlum Abdi was appointed an adviser to the Syrian Presidency — T24

Theoretical sources

• Karl Marx, letters on the Irish question (1869–1870), especially the letter to Meyer and Vogt of 9 April 1870.
• V. I. Lenin, The Right of Nations to Self-Determination (1914).
• V. I. Lenin, What Is to Be Done? (1902), and the writings on inner-party democracy.
• Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks — the concepts of hegemony and passive revolution.
• Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach (1845), the eleventh thesis.

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