President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s eagerly anticipated “historic” address to ruling-party delegates in Kızılcahamam on 12 July offered soaring rhetoric but few concrete gestures toward Turkey’s Kurds, just one day after the PKK’s landmark arms-laying ceremony. Instead, the president repeatedly invoked a streamlined identity triad—“Turks, Kurds and Arabs”—a slogan he used at least ten times, signalling what many analysts see as a neo-Ottoman bid to align Ankara, northern Syria and parts of the Arab world under a single strategic umbrella.
The speech also exposed a fundamental dilemma in the still-fragile dialogue between the government and the pro-Kurdish DEM Party. In a commentary headlined “Erdoğan’ın imkânsız hayali: Suriye’de Rojava’yı Türkiye’de CHP’yi kendi kaderine terk etmeye razı bir Kürt hareketi,” journalist Alper Görmüş argues that two immovable obstacles block any durable partnership: Erdoğan wants DEM to stay silent about the fate of both the autonomous Rojava administration in Syria and Turkey’s main opposition CHP, even as his own AK Party–MHP bloc seeks to marginalise them both insiders insist the “Turks-Kurds-Arabs” formula is meant to project regional harmony, but critics detect a revival of Erdoğan’s post-2016 “Misak-ı Milli” rhetoric, which hints at extra-territorial ambitions. Either way, Kurdish leaders say they cannot simply look the other way. At the same time, Turkish forces continue operations in Rojava, while the secular CHP faces renewed legal and political pressure at home. Moments after Erdoğan declared that “AK Party, MHP and DEM can walk this road together,” DEM deputy speaker Pervin Buldan rushed to clarify that any cooperation would be confined to peace negotiations, “not a political alliance.”
Veteran politician Ahmet Türk, allowed to travel for the PKK ceremony after an eight-year ban, reinforced that message in an interview with Kısa Dalga. He said he would reject any personal reinstatement as Mardin mayor if CHP-run municipalities remained under threat, adding: “All trustee appointments must be lifted.” Such statements suggest that the Kurdish movement views democratic solidarity—not transactional concessions—as the bedrock of any new phase.
For now, progress in the “solution process” appears to hinge on two tangible shifts from Ankara: first, a willingness to acknowledge Rojava’s political reality, or at least to halt the military pressure that imperils it; and second, an end to moves aimed at neutering the CHP and other opposition forces. Until then, Erdoğan’s rebranded tri-ethnic vision risks remaining, to borrow Görmüş’s phrase, an “impossible dream.”
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