At campaign rallies across Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has missed no opportunity to attack gay and trans people. “We are against the LGBT,” he told one rally near the Black Sea. “Family is sacred to us – a strong family means a strong nation.”
At another rally earlier this month, Erdoğan accused every party in Turkey’s opposition coalition of being LGBT.
When Turkish voters go to the polls in parliamentary and presidential elections on 14 May, LGBTQ+ rights as well as women’s rights will be on the ballot. Erdoğan has withdrawn Turkey from the Council of Europe’s Istanbul convention on violence against women and pushed a conservative vision of family values while attacking groups that defend women and queer rights.
For many Turkish women and the LGBTQ+ community, the forthcoming vote represents a stark choice. They say Erdoğan’s re-election risks further fuelling a culture war that he and his supporters have done much to inflame, empowering institutions to crack down on anyone seen as different and to turn a blind eye to a statewide problem of violence against women, gay and trans people.
“For us, this election is critical,” says Zarife Akbulut, of the LGBTQ+ rights group SPoD (Social Policy, Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation Studies Association). “LGBTQ rights are considered human rights in a changing world, but this concept doesn’t exist in Turkey.”
An Erdoğan victory, says Akbulut, risks formalising into policy the kind of hatred that the president has deployed on the campaign trail, and legitimising attacks on gay rights, particularly the right to organise.
“We’ve seen cases where the LGBTQ flag was treated as something illegal,” she says. “The parties in his bloc want the closure of LGBTQ rights organisations, and activists could be arrested over claims that they’re spreading what they call propaganda.”
Despite plenty of highly visible female candidates as well as a handful of openly trans candidates standing for the Workers’ party of Turkey, representation has some way to go. Women are rare in senior leadership positions, barring Meral Akşener, head of the nationalist İYİ party, who has maintained her political appeal through a largely rightwing base.
Akşener has spoken openly of Turkey’s need to return to the Istanbul convention, but has been more cautious on gay rights, stating that while she would be unhappy with a gay child she was also against violence towards LGBTQ+ people.
The Women’s Platform for Equality (EŞİK), a feminist coalition, found that leftwing parties were far more likely to field female candidates, but no party managed gender parity in any of its electoral lists. Political parties across the spectrum, EŞİK said, often placed female candidates in positions on electoral lists that meant they were unlikely to make it into parliament but still required work from women to campaign.
EŞİK also found that many parties were fielding no female candidates on many of their lists across provinces nationwide. This was the case in 40 provinces for the ultranationalist Nationalist Movement party (MHP), in 30 provinces for Erdoğan’s Justice and Development party (AKP), in 22 for the İYİ party, and in 21 provinces for the social democratic Republican People’s party (CHP).
EŞİK has estimated that 117 female deputies will be elected to Turkey’s 600-seat parliament, putting the proportion of women in the assembly at just under a fifth.
“We see in these elections that political representation is unequal,” says Gülsüm Kav, a co-founder of the group We Will Stop Femicide (WWSF), which fights violence against women and LGBTQ+ people in Turkey.
The group was issued with a closure order on “public morality” grounds last year, and Kav, along with the other founders, now regularly appears in court as part of a long judicial battle to ensure WWSF remains open and able to work without threats.
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Turkey was only just beginning to see the effects of its withdrawal from the Istanbul convention in 2021, says Kav, amid a suspected rise in femicides that her organisation is continuing to monitor.
“The violence has escalated while also changing in nature,” she adds. “It took on a more severe character.”
Kav says cabinet ministers’ statements on the campaign trail, including Erdoğan’s, have intensified an environment of intimidation against women and LGBTQ+ people.
“Our ears are bombarded with this propaganda, such as strange claims like if you vote for the opposition, your child will become gay. So we’re dealing with a hazardous environment, where women and LGBTQ people are attacked,” she says.
There are few guarantees that Turkey’s opposition would change things overnight, although the six-party opposition coalition is promising several policies including strengthening equal pay for women and “removing the language and visuals of violence from living spaces”.
There is, however, no mention of rejoining the Istanbul convention or of LGBTQ+ rights. Instead, the opposition promises to “prioritise protecting and preserving the family institution”, which reads like a byword for a failure to protect women’s and LGBTQ+ rights.
Organisations such as SPoD say the opposition is not promising much but would be more likely to create an environment where defending human rights does not put activists in danger. Akbulut says that when her organisation spoke to opposition parties last year, they were told that nothing could change until after the election.