My Twitter account was dormant for a long while after my arrest. When tweets from my account started appearing again in September 2017, prison guards rushed in to inspect my cell. The search was pretty invasive. When I asked them what they were searching for, they replied that they were looking for the source of my tweets.

The only vaguely sophisticated device they found in my cell was the electric kettle I use to boil water. After establishing that I could not have used the kettle to tweet, the guards left. Despite the absurdity of the incident, it was quite revelatory about the indescribable fear that engulfs authoritarian leaders when confronted with opponents who persevere despite persecution. How acute must Mr. Erdogan’s fear be?

For the past three years, the A.K.P. has conducted a relentless propaganda campaign with the acquiescence of the media to undermine the Peoples’ Democratic Party by portraying our members as “terrorist collaborators.” Yet our voters and supporters have remained steadfast.

In the summer of 2015, after the peace process broke down and armed conflict returned to the southeastern Kurdish areas of Turkey, my party did its best to prevent conflict through dialogue. We could have devised more effective ways to stop the fighting.

But everything changed after the June 2015 elections, which saw Mr. Erdogan’s party lose a parliamentary majority. His government insisted on military intervention, and the Turkish Army moved in against the militant Kurdish youth who had set up barricades in various towns and cities.

Mr. Erdogan sought to punish the Kurds, who robbed his party of its parliamentary majority, and to consolidate the nationalist vote. His party won the November 2015 elections and he continued to intensify the conflict thereafter.

The coming elections will shape the future of Turkey. It is statistically unlikely that any candidate who shuns the support of Turkey’s Kurdish population — around one-fifth of its 81 million people — and their demands for peace can win.

An inherently anti-democratic rule in Turkey bars a political party that does not win 10 percent of the national vote from taking its seats in the parliament. The seats are transferred to a party that has crossed the threshold and has the second-highest number of votes on those seats.

We are confident of crossing the steep threshold, but if we fail to get 10 percent of the vote, around 80 of our parliamentary seats will go to Mr. Erdogan’s party, which would deliver him a comfortable majority in the parliament and further ease his executive presidency. In essence, the A.K.P. rule will be unjustly secured through the votes of millions of disenfranchised Kurdish citizens.

Mr. Erdogan and his governing A.K.P. are using the prolonged state of emergency and other underhanded measures to ensure that the H.D.P. doesn’t get 10 percent of the vote.

Thousands of polling stations have been relocated in the southeastern Kurdish region, which will force rural voters to travel miles through military check posts to cast their votes instead of voting in their own villages. An increased number of security personnel are also being deployed at the polling stations in the region, which could cause intimidation of our voters.