Caroline Baudry (in Istanbul), edited by Laura Laplaud / Photo credit: YASIN AKGUL / AFP
For or against Erdogan? The second round of the presidential election in Turkey will pit Recep Tayyip Erdogan against Kemal Kiliçdaroglu on Sunday. If his competitor highlights women’s rights in his campaign, the outgoing president does the opposite, going so far as to say that “gender equality is contrary to nature”.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan found himself on waivers for the first time in the first round of the presidential election on May 14. Facing him: his opponent Kemal Kiliçdaroglu at the head since 2010 of the Republican People’s Party, the CHP, founded in 1923 by the father of modern Turkey. A key element of his campaign: women’s rights, cut back for ten years by the Islamo-conservative President Erdogan after a decade of progress.
The outgoing president also recently affirmed during a meeting that “gender equality is contrary to nature”, also adding that “women should not laugh in public”. Consequently, many Turkish women dream of seeing their president leave.
The pressure on women, “a daily ordeal”
Camp Erdogan’s campaign vans parade through the winding streets of Istanbul. On one of them, three deputies are represented: two smiling men in suits and a woman. His silhouette is blackened, his face obliterated. “We are pushed towards obscurantism. I do not share anything on social networks, but when I saw this, I immediately published a photo”, launches Nayan, a passer-by who says she is revolted.
This pressure on women is, she says, “a daily test”. “Erdogan’s state judges and condemns the way we dress, the way we laugh. Tomorrow they will even enter our bedroom wanting to ban abortion,” she continues.
More than 300 feminicides in 2022
The violence is increasing day by day, denounces the co-founder of the Stop Femicide association, which campaigns for the return of her country to the Istanbul convention that Erdogan left in 2001. “With this international treaty, when a woman was abused by her husband, her father or her brother, this man was far from home. Today, there are women who are supposed to be under the protection of the State who still get murdered.” His association lists more than 300 feminicides in 2022, 100 more than over the same period as ten years ago.