One of the most respected thinkers of the liberal left in Turkey, Murat Belge, assessed the outcome of the Nov. 1 elections in his column in the daily Taraf: "From June to November, we passed through an absurd half-year. ... All the loss of life became the most bitter item in the balance sheet of that lost half-year. At the end of half a year, in terms of the Kurdish question, we are at the worst point that could be imagined.”

Such a gloomy assessment does not nurture some people's optimistic idea that maybe the election results had a silver lining: that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the ever-confident Justice and Development Party (AKP) could manifest more flexibility and resume the Kurdish peace process. After all, Erdogan had stated that the peace process was in a deep freeze, but not dead. Therefore, when the circumstances allow, it could be revived and those election results that favored him so much could be helpful.

But the strategy that brought an astounding victory to Erdogan and the AKP was based on resuming the war against the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and demonizing the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), which in the June 7 election had cost AKP its single-party government. 

It worked, but observers don't agree on why or how. Most of these observers are mistaken when assessing the trajectory of the Kurdish votes.