Speaking to the Mesopotamian Agency, Center for Political and Social Studies (SAMER) Coordinator, Yüksel Genç said that the AKP doesn’t have a discourse appealing to Kurds either in its election manifestos or in the electoral campaign.

Genç underlined that the AKP cannot go beyond the “my Kurdish brothers" discourse, and added: “This is perhaps the most difficult process for the 16-year AKP government to make rhetoric about the Kurdish issue”.

Genç added: “The AKP has implemented so many wrong policies and done so many bad things to Kurds that now it doesn’t know which way to begin in order to fix things. Look at Sur and Cizre, which for the past three years have been living under incredible repression and violence, but also look at the invasion of Afrin and the referendum in South Kurdistan and the issue of Kirkuk. There are so many wrongs that it is difficult to see how it could rectify things”.

Pointing to the alliance the AKP has forged with the MHP, Genç said: "There is a conservative-nationalist content in the main program of the AKP-MHP. Accordingly, there is an emphasis on the single state and single life. It is very difficult for them to place Kurds in such a fiction. In fact, the AKP has not even a proper discourse for Kurds within its party. The AKP has left no promised space to the Kurdish question”.

Genç questioned the AKP’s silence about the Kurds in the election campaign and added: “The AKP is keeping silence in order to not provoke a reaction. Because it knows that such a reaction would actually mean a bigger loss of votes. Which is why the AKP is acting as if there were no Kurdish question”.

Speaking about what the Kurds think of the Kurdish policies carried out by the AKP, Genç explained the results of her research as follows: "We see that the Kurds do not consider this an ordinary election. Kurds appeared more and more to ask themselves, ‘Which type of Turkey? or they appeared to want to say, ‘I am here too’. So the first round of the Presidential election - said Genç - is very important for the Kurds. Kurds think that if they will be able to impose their existence in the first round, then they can have a decisive role in the political life of Turkey”.