TURKEY — Sitting in front of a huge image of Islam’s holiest shrine, Ahmet Turanli, an elder of the Resvan tribe, is just the sort of man whose support Turkey’s ruling AK Party might want in a parliamentary election on Sunday.

Tribes like Turanli’s, mostly of Kurdish, Turkmen and Arab origin and concentrated in Turkey’s southeast, were a powerful force in past elections, in some cases voting in blocs of tens of thousands, often in favor of the Islamist-rooted AKP.

This time, some may rally behind a pro-Kurdish opposition party and potentially cost President Tayyip Erdogan the AKP majority he wants to help guarantee him executive powers.

Sunday’s vote could see the AKP’s majority shrink for the first time since it entered parliament in 2002, particularly if the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) can cross the 10 percent threshold needed to win representation.

Turanli sees an almost existential battle for Kurdish political identity, with the HDP, its roots in Kurdish nationalism, contesting the election as a party for the first time.