Poll: 73% of Kurdish voters likely to vote for HDP

According to a recent poll, 73% of the Kurdish voters in Turkey is likely to vote for the pro-Kurdish opposition Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) in the coming parliamentary election, while 9% will likely vote for the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), and 6.5% for the main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP).

67.4% of the participants in the poll said that they had voted for HDP in the 2018 election, 18.5% for AKP, and 3.8% for CHP. The results indicate a notable increase in the support for HDP and CHP, and a significant shrinking in AKP's voter base among Kurds.

The poll was conducted by Spectrum House in November with the participation of 1,934 people in Turkey's Kurdish-majority provinces of Agri, Bitlis, Diyarbakir, Kars, Igdir, Mardin, Mus, Sirnak, Urfa, Van, and in Istanbul, Mersin, Konya and Bursa that house significant Kurdish populations.

Asked which bloc they would vote for in the coming election, 70.7% of the participants said they would vote for the bloc led by HDP, 9.4% said they would vote for the bloc of AKP and its ally Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), and 9.2% for the bloc of six opposition parties led by CHP and Good Party, the Nation Alliance. The results indicate that HDP is likely to receive two percentage points more in case it competes single-handedly in the election rather than as part of a bloc of parties.

74% of HDP voters said that the party should run with its own candidate in the first round of the presidential election, while 13.3% said that it should support the Nation Alliance's candidate. Merely 1% of HDP voters said it should support the candidate of the ruling bloc.

The rate of support for a HDP candidate in the first round in Kurdish-majority provinces (76.1%) is significantly higher than the rate in other four provinces (70.8%).

74.3% of all Kurdish voters said they would vote for HDP's candidate if the presidential election was to be held next Sunday, while 10.5% said they would vote for Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the candidate of the ruling bloc.

76.3% of the voters said they would vote in the second round for the candidate endorsed by the party they supported, while 11.3% said they would vote for the ruling bloc's candidate Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

70.4 of the HDP voters said that in case HDP was banned by the Constitutional Court before the election, they would vote for the "new party representing HDP." While 8.8% said they would boycott the election in such a situation, 7% said they would vote for CHP, 1.7% for AKP, 0.6% for the Labor Party of Turkey (TIP). The remaining 10.7% is either undecided or did not reply.