Turkish President Gay-Baits Rivals, Labeling Them “Pro-LGBT”
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, facing a tight re-election bid, is pandering to conservatives by linking his opponents to the LGBTQ community.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan slammed his political opponents for failing to uphold traditional Islamic values, labeling opposition parties as “pro-LGBT” during a rally in Istanbul on Sunday, May 7, ahead of what promises to be a close election on May 14.
An authoritarian who heads the Justice and Development Party (AKP), Erdoğan has long pandered to cultural and religious conservatives, often seeking to “gay-bait” any who speak in opposition to his political decisions, based on the belief that the conservative Turkish electorate will turn on any figure associated, even indirectly, with the LGBTQ community.
For instance, last October, Erdoğan proposed a constitutional amendment to deny legal recognition of LGBTQ rights to counter a popular constitutional amendment brought by the left-wing secularist Republican People’s Party (CHP), which sought to enshrine a woman’s right to wear a religious headscarf into the constitution.
By introducing an amendment that attacks the LGBTQ community, Erdoğan hoped to not only cement support among social conservatives, especially radical Islamists who have long backed his party but to force CHP and other opposition parties to either come out in favor of his proposed amendment or reveal their pro-LGBTQ sympathies and risk losing the votes of devout Muslims.
As public polls indicate that AKP has lost the level of support it once enjoyed before the global COVID-19 pandemic, especially with respect to inflation, rising prices, higher costs of living, and other economic issues, Erdoğan has increasingly found his party on the defensive, lashing out at rivals and desperately trying to paint them as opponents of “family values.”
Speaking at Sunday’s rally in Istanbul, Erdoğan, who has held a lock on power for nearly two decades — serving as prime minister from 2003 to 2014 and as president since 2014 — vowed never to advance pro-LGBT policies, according to Reuters.
“AK Party and other parties in our alliance would never be pro-LGBT, because family is sacred to us. We will bury those pro-LGBT in the ballot box,” he said.
He also attacked his chief rival, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the head of the CHP opposition party, as catering to “deviants.”
Kılıçdaroğlu is the unity candidate of the six-party Nation Alliance, a group of opposition parties seeking to consolidate votes in order to effectively challenge not only Erdoğan’s lock on power but the country’s all-powerful executive presidency.
“My people will not allow drunks and boozers to take the stage,” Erdoğan said. “Mr. Kemal, you can drink barrels of it, nothing can cure you.”
That rhetoric appears to be an appeal to Islamists who oppose consumption of alcohol for religious reasons.
During the pandemic, the AKP-led government imposed bans on the sale of alcohol, which some right-wingers have embraced as part of a larger effort to reverse nearly 100 years of secularization that occurred following the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the eventual end of the Turkish War of Independence in 1923.
Polling averages ahead of the May 14 election indicate a tight race between Erdoğan’s and Kılıçdaroğlu’s parties, with both sides enjoying less than 50% support among the electorate, which could foreshadow a runoff between AKP and CHP on May 28. By comparison, Erdoğan’s AKP easily coasted to re-election in 2018, winning 52% of the vote overall and running more than 22 points ahead of CHP.
Although homosexuality was decriminalized by the Ottoman Empire back in 1858, homosexuality is widely frowned upon by large segments of Turkish society, especially in more rural areas and among political supporters of AKP.
In 2020, Erdoğan attacked LGBTQ people to deflect from the government’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, claiming that LGBTQ individuals have been “trying to poison” young people in Turkey by presenting homosexuality as a naturally-occurring phenomenon and same-sex relationships as “normal.”
In 2021, the AKP-led government withdrew from the Istanbul Convention on protecting women’s rights, claiming it would encourage homosexuality and threaten traditional family structures. That same year, the country’s Interior Minister issued a string of tweets bashing LGBTQ individuals as “deviants” and “deranged,” prompting Twitter to flag his tweets as potentially problematic and place warnings on them.
Last September, thousands of Turkish people marched as part of a demonstration calling on the government to forcibly close all LGBTQ organizations, ban any media depictions of LGBTQ people, and crack down on the dissemination of information that presents homosexuality in a positive or value-neutral light — echoing similar laws imposed by other authoritarian regimes in Hungary, Russia, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and much of the Middle East and North Africa.
Support Metro Weekly’s Journalism
These are challenging times for news organizations. And yet it’s crucial we stay active and provide vital resources and information to both our local readers and the world. So won’t you please take a moment and consider supporting Metro Weekly with a membership? For as little as $5 a month, you can help ensure Metro Weekly magazine and MetroWeekly.com remain free, viable resources as we provide the best, most diverse, culturally-resonant LGBTQ coverage in both the D.C. region and around the world. Memberships come with exclusive perks and discounts, your own personal digital delivery of each week’s magazine (and an archive), access to our Member's Lounge when it launches this fall, and exclusive members-only items like Metro Weekly Membership Mugs and Tote Bags! Check out all our membership levels here and please join us today!
You must be logged in to post a comment.