Diyarbakir // Turkey votes on Sunday in a parliamentary election crucial to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s hopes of expanding his powers.
Tensions are high after blasts at a rally of the main pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP) on Friday that killed two people and wounded dozens.
Kurdish votes will be crucial in determining whether Mr Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) gets the supermajority that would allow it to change the constitution and transfer the prime minister’s executive powers to the president.
If the HDP gets a minimum 10 per cent of the votes required to take seats in parliament, it would effectively block that possibility. Polls have indicated that the election is on a knife-edge, with the HDP’s rating hovering just at or below that threshold.
At least one of the lethal explosions at the HDP rally was from TNT, and both explosions involved “cell phone mechanisms”, a government minister said on Saturday, citing police.
Agriculture minister Mehdi Eker, who is from south-eastern city of Diyarbakir where the explosions occurred, said 80 people, including two policemen, were being treated in hospitals.
Most were not in serious condition and were being treated for cuts, blows and shrapnel wounds. Eight people were in serious condition and had been operated on, he said.
Mr Erdogan described the attack as a “bid to overshadow the elections”.
He said he had he tried the leader of HDP, Selahattin Demirtas, to express condolences and condemn the attack, but that Mr Demirtas had not taken his calls.
Mr Demirtas said in a speech on Saturday, the last day of campaigning, that Mr Erdogan had not uttered “a single word about that savage attack”.
“He may have tried to reach me, but whether he reached me or not is not important,” he said.
The funeral of one of the bombing victims, 17-year-old Ramazan Yildiz, was held on Saturday morning.
The blasts were the latest strike during the campaign against the HDP, which represents Turkey’s Kurdish minority but is increasingly reaching out to secular Turks.
It had already seen one of its drivers shot dead, regional offices attacked and one of its other rallies stormed by nationalists.
The blasts resulted in the cancellation of the HDP’s Diyarbakir rally, one of the centrepieces of its campaign, where Mr Demirtas was to have given a speech.
He later urged supporters not to take to the streets and show moderation, tweeting that “peace will win”.
Several thousand people held a sit-in protest at the rally site on Saturday, waving HDP flags and chanting the “AKP will be held accountable”.
The HDP has been leading an energetic campaign aimed at surmounting the tough 10 per cent vote barrier needed to send MPs to the Turkish parliament.
In a bitter and personal campaign, Mr Erdogan launched a series of attacks against the HDP’s leader, rubbishing Mr Demirtas as a “pretty boy” who was acting as a front for Kurdish militants.
Mr Erdogan’s participation in the campaign has been hugely controversial since he should have severed his links with party politics after becoming president in August last year, following an unbroken stint as prime minister stretching back to 2003.
The AKP has been under greater pressure than in previous polls, with the economy losing some of its former sparkle and controversy growing over what critics say are Mr Erdogan’s authoritarian tendencies.
Polls have indicated that the party’s vote could be well down on the almost 50 per cent it received in the last elections in 2011 and that it may even need to form a coalition.
The main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) is expected to come second, followed by the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), with the HDP in fourth.
* Agence France Presse and Associated Press