transl. Deniz Turgay

We’re only days away from the May 14 elections. Examining how the alliances relate to the current authoritarian system and democracy, these crucial elections to be held in the year marking the centenary of the republic amplify the feeling that either darkness or freedom is awaiting Turkey.

The alliances that the political parties have formed reveal the social polarization that started to emerge in 2010 and has been advertently instigated by the AKP, especially after the period of state of emergency in 2015. Those who wish that the current authoritarian system continue to flock to the Cumhur (“People”), those who argue for parliamentary democracy to Millet (“Nation”), those who espouse leftist ideals, even though they come from various backgrounds, to Emek ve Özgürlük (“Labor and Freedom”), and those who coalesce with extreme right, nationalism, anti-immigration, and racism to Ata (in reference to Atatürk) Alliances. There also seems to be a lack of promises regarding the rights of women, children, and LGBTI+, as well as a substantially low number of female candidates from all parties except for those in Emek ve Özgürlük Alliance.

When we examine both the separate election manifestos and the joint protocol of the political parties (AKP, BBP, YRP, HÜDAPAR, MHP) that make up the Cumhur Alliance, the crystallized form of Turkey’s authoritarian system, it appears that they all intersect at concepts of anti-democracy, opposition to equality and justice, anti-secularism, and hostility towards women, children, and LGBTI+. The alliance, thus, is not only built with loyalty to the one-man regime and political Islam but also ignoring and eliminating the rights of women and LGBTI+ as a mortar. Likewise, they’re shooting for the same target when it comes to alimony for women and children, the Civil Code, the Law No. 6284 on the Protection of the Family and the Prevention of Violence Against Women, LGBTI+ people whom they deem “deviant” and “a threat to the family institution”, the legal obstacles to forced marriage of children, and many more other rights and freedoms for which women’s organizations continue to vindicate. In this article, we will examine the promises of the Cumhur Alliance that serve to make male dominance absolute as an extension of the AKP’s gender policy that aims to abolish the vested rights of women, especially since 2016 under three main headings and discuss the darkness they “herald” to women, children, and LGBTI+ people.

Holy Family, Civil Code, and Alimony

The Divorce Commission’s 2016 report was crucial for the progress of women’s and children’s rights in Turkey. As the feminist lawyer Hülya Gülbahar puts it, the report, which is practically a government program on gender equality, underlined the government’s concern about the increase in divorces, as well as recommendations that increased the dominance of religion in family policy, eliminated women’s and children’s rights, especially poverty alimony and child support, arising from the Civil Code, put women and children at greater risk of being exposed to violence, and made it impossible for them to escape from this violence. Since the first day that the AKP came to power, women have been deemed and represented not as free individuals, but as a part of the family “as creation” and those who fall outside this family framework are condemned in political discourse with phrases such as “A woman who is not a mother and does not take care of her home is an incomplete, half woman.”

As I have discussed earlier on the Purple Line’s Blog, poverty alimony is the main agenda of the male-dominated movement against gender equality and women’s rights, which has gained momentum circa 2016. When we take a closer look, however, we see that these groups are against not only alimony but also women’s right to divorce, custody, joint distribution of acquired property, participation or precautionary alimony, in short, the principle of equality, which is the essence of the Civil Code. Since being put on the agenda with the “100-Day Action Program” announced by Erdoğan after the Presidential Election in 2018, the relevant ministers have made frequent statements about the amendments to the law on poverty alimony. The government’s attempts in this direction have been unsuccessful for now due to the superhuman efforts of the women’s movement.

One of the promises about family made by the parties constituting the Cumhur Alliance, both in their separate party declarations and in the joint protocol, is “relieving the grievances arising from indefinite alimony” due to the so-called concern of “preserving family integrity”. While the preferred terminology, that is, the term “indefinite alimony” adopted by its opponents even when the legal name is “poverty alimony”, is a clear indication of where the government and its supporters stand on women’s rights. We can clearly see, if the party maintains its power in this new period, that whose language and wishes the AKP will prioritize and whose will they will ignore, and that the material and spiritual needs, rights, and freedoms of women and children, ready to be sacrificed for the so-called family integrity, are not on their agenda.

The election vehicle covered with the photographs of the parliamentary candidates of the Yeniden Refah Party only showed the female parliamentary candidate as a silhouette while the two men were depicted smiling. The party first released a statement saying that this was the candidate’s wish, but then a correction stating that the printing company was to blame for the image. One way or another, we are left with a visual that clearly illustrates the situation of women in the future promised by the Cumhur Alliance: Only a shadow.

The matter is not limited to alimony either. Two components of the Cumhur Alliance, HÜDAPAR, associated with Hezbollah, responsible for the association of Islamic feminist Konca Kuriş[1], and the Yeniden Refah Party, whose leader recently stated that adultery must be considered a crime again, are completely against the Civil Code. Not only that, as Berrin Sönmez stated in her article in Gazete Duvar, there are voices arising from these two parties against the laws banning the marriage of minors, and “for the marriage age to be lowered to 12 years of age for girls, maybe to 9, or even 6.” It is necessary to consider these facts together with lived examples. Like the example of Yusuf Ziya Gümüşel, the founder of the Hiranur Foundation affiliated with the İsmailağa Sect, marrying his 6-year-old daughter to a 29-year-old disciple, Kadir İstekli, according to journalist Timur Soykan’s special report from January 2023.

Bringing together religious orders, sects, and misogynists from all walks of life, the Cumhur Alliance parties seem to promise women and children, under the guise of religious and national values, the dream of a family where violence and abuse are rampant and salvation is impossible in their declarations and joint protocol. In this envisioned family of theirs, women and children are not equal members, but merely tools for the perpetuity of “family headship” fused with the broader absolute male domination, which is essential for men to maintain their privileged position in society.

The Masculine Alliance’s Eternal Target: Law No. 6284 on Preventing Violence Against Women

With HÜDAPAR and YRP, which were among the actors behind the withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention overnight with a Presidential Decree in March 2021, the Cumhur Alliance seems to be a sign that the AKP will continue to abolish women’s earned rights with the maxim “What we do is just the harbinger of what we will do.” One of the promises “heralded” by the alliance parties in order to “protect the family” is the repeal of Law No. 6284 on the Prevention of Violence Against Women. 

The Yeniden Refah Party, for example, made it their business to abolish the Law No. 6284, claiming that it is a “part of tricks of foreign powers and globalist racist imperialism”, a “sin”, and “designed to disrupt the family structure and destroy homes”. The law, however, is a part of the Istanbul Convention and was put into effect in 2012 as a result of the efforts of the women’s movement. It aims to protect survivors of economic, physical, sexual, or psychological violence, as well as punishing the perpetrator with a restraining order and granting a protection order for the survivor. Even though the prominence given to the survivor’s statement serves a preventive function, possible false statements are also penalized.

The Law No. 6284 was one of the first vested rights targeted following the decision to withdraw from the Istanbul Convention, and, according to Canan Güllü, President of the Federation of Women’s Associations of Turkey, the law enforcers started acting as if the Law No. 6284 had been abolished too, even in the first months after the withdrawal, and there was a significant decrease in the number of women calling the helpline. Femicide reports also confirm this claim: A significant portion of the women murdered by men already had restraining and protection orders taken, but the reluctance of law enforcement to follow up and intervene enabled the perpetrators.

The Cumhur Alliance describes barring the perpetrators of violence from home with a restraining order as “victimization”, and accuses the Law No. 6284, an effective tool in the fight against violence against women, of being the actual cause of domestic violence and disrupting the integrity of the family unit. In Turkey, the country with the highest rate of violence against women among European, OECD, and G20 countries with 38 percent according to OECD’s 2019 data, it seems that the inertia in the fight against violence will persist, and the fate of female survivors of violence will be left to the mercy of the perpetrator of violence if the AKP stays in power.

Violence, Fear, and Hostility Towards Women and LGBTI+: From Candidates to Voters 

The election campaign period continues under a shadow of violent acts and a reign of fear led by the AKP and their voters. The threatening vernacular adopted by AKP politicians in rallies, which seems to only contribute to more violence and fear, is unfortunately not limited to them: AKP voters also showcase their menaceful signs and messages targeting opponents such as “Say the word and we’ll shoot, say the word and we’ll die” on social media and at rallies. These threats, unfortunately, did not remain as mere words: At the Erzurum rally of Ekrem İmamoğlu, Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality Mayor and vice presidential candidate, both CHP MPs and İmamoğlu supporters were attacked with stones. Many people, including women and children, were injured as a result of this attack.

This language of violence and fear is laced with the ugliness of sexism and hostility towards LGBTI+. One of the main campaign points of Süleyman Soylu, current Interior Minister and AKP candidate, is this hostility. “These elections are to decide whether men should marry men and women should marry women,” Soylu claims, describing the May 14 elections as a “coup attempt”. He clearly makes LGBTI+ people a target for his voters with unrealistic definitions, saying “These self-proclaimed ‘LGBT+Q’ also wish for the marriage between animals and humans.”

Sexism and homophobia, frequently weaponized by Cumhur Alliance candidates in their attempts to humiliate the opposition, seem to be widespread among their voters too. Most recently, a group of AKP voters attended the party’s Istanbul rally with a sign reading “We want a leader who works like a bee, not one who doesn’t leave the kitchen like a woman” in reference to the fact that Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the presidential candidate of the Millet Alliance, shot videos detailing his campaign promises from the kitchen of his home. Kılıçdaroğlu responded to this sign with a photo of himself pouring tea in the kitchen and with the words “Proud to share everything in life.”

Traces of the Global Counter-Movement in Local

Turkey started to get in sync with the widespread anti-gender movement prevailing in Eastern Europe in 2019. However, the Turkish context is atypical within this counter-movement due to the country’s cultural and sociological dynamics. According to Alev Özkazanç, the movement’s agenda consists of three main issues in almost all European countries: Debates on the legalization of same-sex marriages and adoption for same-sex couples, reproductive rights (abortion laws and new reproductive technologies), and sex education provided in schools (since the curriculum mentions the LGBTI+ community). In Turkey, however, there has not been significant progress in the name of these causes for them to actually become an agenda. Instead, Turkish gender politics debates consist primarily of male violence against women and femicides. The decision to withdraw from the Istanbul Convention, thus, was a sign that the government adhered to certain groups mainly consisting of Islamists to uphold its legitimacy and power. Precisely because of this reasoning, they could not find social support for the decision to withdraw. To legitimize it, they then resorted to propaganda focusing on this imaginary “threat of homosexual perversion.” Examining the religious groups taking the lead in the Family March held against the so-called “LGBT imposition” in September 2022, we see that this propaganda did not take hold of the general public to the desired extent and was only limited to a small and radical clique.

However, the AKP moved into high gear with this gender policy, concerned about the future of their political power. The amendment to the Constitution that they proposed in October 2022 envisaged changing the definition of family and adding the phrase “Family consists of men, women, and children.” The purpose of this amendment was to “prevent LGBTI+ and other similar movements.” Considering this fact together with the ban on feminist night marches on March 8 and November 25 and the police violence towards women when they still decided to march, women’s rights advocates and the LGBTI+ community have long been labeled as a direct threat to state security.

This deep divide in society when it comes to gender equality and women’s, children’s, and LGBTI+ rights, as well as the government policies, indicate what future awaits all other marginalized groups (that is, anyone who is not an AKP supporter, according to the politics adopted by the AKP). As a final note, we should also point out that, examining the campaign promises of the parties, gender is not merely a tool to distract the public or a secondary issue for the AKP or other radical groups in the Cumhur Alliance, contrary to popular belief. The rights and freedoms of women, children, and LGBTI+ people have long been seen as a threat to male domination and the survival of the current government. There is a substantial reason for this, of course: Women and LGBTI+ people are the leading groups who have been adamantly opposing male domination and the government for many years. Our adamant struggle, which makes us a threat in their eyes, will only continue to grow stronger.

[1] Islamic feminist researcher and writer Konca Kuriş was kidnapped in front of her house in 1998 and was found dead in the basement of a house belonging to Hezbollah in Konya in 2000.