In Turkey, secular women alarmed about future under new Erdoğan term

Women’s rights groups in Turkey, fearful that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s election victory will further threaten past legal victories, are rethinking their strategies as they lick their wounds.

Mr. Erdoğan narrowly defeated opposition candidate Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, 52% to 48%, in a runoff election vote, benefiting from strong support among the conservative, religious women who have long constituted his loyal base.

“Erdoğan made us feel accepted as women in headscarves,” said Aysa Kartal, a homemaker with three children, as she voted for the president in Istanbul on Sunday. “We are happy and satisfied with the way things are and we want to continue this way.

But what satisfies Ms. Kartal alarms more liberal women seeking to protect Turkey’s secular constitution from the influence of Islamist conservatives.

In his victory speech Sunday, Mr. Erdoğan promised to protect women from violence. “Violence against women is forbidden … and no one should dare to attempt it,” he said. But he also made clear his hostility to LGBTQ+ rights. “We consider the family sacred, and no one can insult it,” he declared to a cheering crowd.

This month’s elections sent the highest number of women to parliament in Turkey’s recent political history: They won 121 of 600 seats.

But the government “has a vision of women embedded in traditional values,” says Valeria Giannotta, scientific director of CeSPI Observatory on Türkiye, a Rome-based think tank. “It doesn’t mean that women are just housewives; women can work. But eventually they should become a wife and mother of three children.”

Rolling back reforms

Irem Birol, a 35-year-old translator, is single and child-free. She voted for the opposition and now fears a gradual decline in women’s freedoms, pointing to Mr. Erdoğan’s record over the past decade.

During Mr. Erdoğan’s first ten years in power, as prime minister, feminists pushed through seminal reforms that modernized the Turkish penal code to recognize women as equals in marriage and inheritance.

The ruling Justice and Development party (AKP) passed laws protecting women against violence. That was partly prompted by Turkey’s ambition to join the European Union, which was demanding improvements in Turkey’s human rights. But Ankara has shelved its efforts to join the EU in favor of strengthening its regional influence. 

The tide began to turn in 2013, many political observers say, when police attacked protesters, including women’s rights activists. In 2021, Mr. Erdoğan withdrew Turkey from the 2011 Istanbul Convention, a European treaty that defends women and LGBTQ+ people from gender-based violence and discrimination. He said the convention violated Turkish family values.

Femicides and suspicious deaths of women have risen consistently in the last 10 years, reaching 579 in 2022, according to the volunteer group “We Will Stop Femicides Platform.” The group is facing charges in court for insulting the president, which Fidan Ataselim, the group’s secretary general, calls a political ploy to silence their activism.

In her eyes, the women’s cause lost the election, but Ms. Ataselim says she plans to organize in bigger numbers to fight back.

“After the elections, in only one day, nearly 1,000 women responded to our call to join our platform,” she says. “We will do our best to increase this hope.”

“Leave us alone”

Feminist activists say they are especially nervous about the influence that two radical Islamist parties will wield now that they have seats in parliament for the first time. The New Welfare party and the Kurdish Free Cause party, both allied with the AKP, won only eight seats between them, but they are expected to push hard for their key demands, and could galvanize the government into action.

The two fringe parties have been seeking to repeal laws protecting women’s rights for years, advocating policies such as segregating genders in schools, lowering the legal marriage age for girls, weakening the law giving women the right to restraining orders against their abusers, and abolishing alimony. They also seek to criminalize adultery, repeal the statutory rape law, and ban abortion.

“The AKP will trade women’s rights for political gain,” with its allies, worries Şehnaz Kıymaz Bahçeci, a Berlin-based adviser to Turkish women’s rights groups.

The two parties “have a violent past and people do not feel safe at all,” adds Selime Büyükgöze, one of the organizers of the Feminist Night March on International Women’s Day who volunteers for a group providing shelters for abused women. “Now they will have more power.”

Ms. Bahçeci is frustrated that many women “voted for parties which made them invisible,” as she puts it, but she has not given up hope of winning over Erdoğan supporters. “We need to talk to women on the ground more, so they can understand who serves them best,” she says. 

Ms. Kartal, the homemaker, on the other hand, says she knows her rights and believes the ruling government won’t betray her. For her, feminism is an unwanted Western idea. “I want to tell Westerners ... to leave us alone,” she says. “We can fix our own problems with our Islamic ideals.”

Activists say dismissing feminism as Western is a common tactic to delegitimize basic women’s rights. Ms. Birol, the translator, is among them, and she says she is aware of her waning rights. But she is also tired of the divisions in Turkish society stoked by politicians.

Her relatives, Ms. Birol says, some secular, some religious, are capable of discussing their differences at family gatherings, but they have decided it is better to avoid politics altogether.  

“We chose peace together,” she explains. “So we can still have pleasant family dinners and can respect each other’s boundaries.”