LGBT IS THE NEW KURDS OF TURKEY
Turkey’s most critical election in recent history is less than a week away. After 21 years of authoritarian one-man rule, political Islamist Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is for the first time this close to losing his seat. The Erdogan regime, shaken by an economic crisis, high food inflation and, most recently, an earthquake that killed tens of thousands of people, faces a strong opposition block. Polls suggest that Erdogan will either lose the election in the first round by a small margin or will be defeated more overwhelmingly in the second round of an election that will go to a run-off by a hair’s breadth.
Kurds have always been the target of the hateful and divisive discourse of politics in Turkey in recent years. The Kurds and the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), the representative of the Kurdish political struggle, who participated in the last two presidential elections with their own candidates, were targeted by both the political Islamist AKP and its junior ruling partner, the ultra-nationalist fascist MHP, and the nationalist or Mustafa Kemal nationalist, pro-military faction within the social democratic CHP, with their votes exceeding 10%, their influential presence on social media and their courageous discourse.
In these elections, however, the Kurdish political movement and the HDP chose to support the opposition bloc united against Erdoğan from the outside, instead of participating in the elections with their own candidates. For the opposition bloc, the votes of Kurdish voters above 10% were crucial. The dictator Erdogan, on the other hand, recruited another Kurdish party as an alternative to the HDP and their leader Selahattin Demirtas, who has been held as a political hostage in prison for 7 years, despite the fact that there is no final court decision against him. HÜDAPAR, the political extension of the radical Islamist terrorist organization Hezbollah in Turkey, is a political party that appeals to conservative Kurdish voters.
That is why no one could risk angering Kurds with hateful and divisive language in these elections.
But the gods demanded sacrifices. Politicians needed an effective “enemy” to rally the public, especially in crowded metropolitan rallies, and the media needed an audience to target.
The Workers’ Party of Turkey (TİP), a socialist party in the opposition bloc, nominated a total of 3 LGBTIQA+ individuals, one of whom was a trans woman. When the social democratic CHP, the IYI Party led by a moderate nationalist woman leader, the parties of two right-wing liberal leaders and of course the HDP of the Kurdish movement also announced election programs promising freedom and equality for LGBT rights and sexual orientations, Erdoğan and the fascist-Islamist ruling front found the enemy they were looking for.
First, the current government’s Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu started making anti-LGBT speeches at election rallies. Soylu claimed that “if the opposition wins the election, they will legalize man-to-man and woman-to-woman marriage”, even though no party in the opposition block has made such a promise. In his next speech, Soylu claimed that “the LGBT movement advocates for the marriage of humans and animals”. Meral Akşener, the moderate nationalist female leader, responded to these bizarre claims by Interior Minister Soylu. Akşener responded to Soylu’s constant attacks on the LGBT movement both in his rallies and television speeches by claiming that “obsessive homophobic attitudes are a sign of hidden homosexuality” and insinuated that Soylu was a “hidden homosexual.” (https://onedio.com/haber/meral-aksener-suleyman-soylu-nun-gay-evliligi-iddialarina-sert-yanit-verdi-fantezide-sinir-yok-1146035)
The opposition block’s Ankara mayor Mansur Yavaş, who has nationalist roots but is now a member of the CHP, and Ekrem İmamoğlu, a very popular figure in Turkish politics and mayor of Istanbul, a metropolis of 20 million people, also criticized Soylu’s LGBT rhetoric. Imamoğlu interpreted Soylu’s mention of LGBT people in every speech as “obsession with sexuality” and said “there is a strange subconscious.” (https://t24.com.tr/video/imamoglu-nun-soylu-ya-lgb-ti-q-yaniti-akli-baska-bir-yere-calismiyor-tuhaf-bir-bilincalti-var,53890)
Addressing the nationalist opposition electorate, Ankara Mayor Mansur Yavaş responded to Soylu by saying that “LGBT associations were established during the AKP rule”. In other words, from Yavaş’s point of view, allowing the establishment of LGBT associations was a “mistake” and this mistake was made by Soylu himself, who criticized the LGBT movement.
It is noteworthy that in these discourses, being an LGBT person is openly stated as something reprehensible, respecting the LGBT movement and LGBT rights, and promising freedom and equality to LGBT people is criminalized, while the opposition “accuses” the other side of the same thing in response.
One of the participants in the LGBT debate was Fatih Erbakan, the son of Necmettin Erbakan, a conservative right-wing figure, leader of an extreme Islamist party and former prime minister of the country. Fatih Erbakan’s YRP, which supported Erdogan in the presidential elections but ran as a separate party in the elections, included in its election manifesto “the closure of LGBT associations” and “the criminalization of sexual intercourse outside marriage”. In his official propaganda speech on behalf of his party on state-run TRT, Erbakan explicitly stated this and promised to enforce these bans if elected. Erbakan also declared that they would protect Turkish youth from “disasters such as deism and atheism.” (https://haber.sol.org.tr/haber/erbakanin-trtdeki-vaadi-lgbt-derneklerinin-tamamini-kapatacagiz-373759)
The last person to join the LGBT debate was Recep Tayyip Erdoğan himself. In his election speeches, Erdoğan said, “The family institution of this nation is strong. LGBT does not come out of this nation.” He ignored or excommunicated hundreds of thousands of LGBTIQA+ individuals in Turkey. (https://www.bbc.com/turkce/articles/cd1rylgypz2o) (https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/erdogan-calls-opposition-pro-lgbt-election-rally-2023-05-07/) (https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2023/05/erdogan-slams-turkeys-lgbtq-community-weaponizes-homophobia-ahead-vote)
Erdogan’s remarks were brought to the agenda by Russia Today with the sentence “Turkish opposition is gay.” (https://www.reddit.com/r/Turkey/comments/138e50p/turkish_opposition_is_gay_erdogan/) In another election speech, Erdoğan claimed that opposition parties “are LGBT”: “CHP is LGBT, IYI Party is LGBT, HDP is LGBT…” (https://ifpnews.com/erdogan-turkish-opposition-gay/)
What was striking in all these debates was that the opposition failed to develop a response to Erdoğan and his staff’s discourse in the context of rights and freedoms, and failed to defend the LGBT movement boldly and loudly enough.
It was as if both sides accused each other of being “more LGBT supporters”.
Two of the most concrete examples of this are the allegations that former Ankara Mayor Melih Gökçek of the AKP was in a relationship with a transvestite sex worker named Okşan and the revelations that the son of Binali Yıldırım, also a prominent former AKP politician, had a relationship with a media gay icon. (https://www.habererk.com/melih-gokcekin-travesti-oksan-ile-iliskisi-sosyal-medyayi-salladi) (https://www.muhalif.com.tr/haber/muhammed-yakutun-yeni-bomba-iddiasi-binali-yildirimin-oglu-erkam-yildirim-ile-kerimcanin-iliskisi-var-133975)
Here, the opposition did not hesitate to use the allegations that two names close to the AKP had homosexual relations as a counter-weapon. In other words, against the opposition, which sees homosexuality or supporting LGBT rights as a shame, the opposition has adopted an attitude that reinforces the discriminatory and hateful language of “you say so, but there are homosexuals among you too”.
In short, in Turkey’s 2023 elections, the LGBT movement and LGBT individuals were used as a weapon and became the victims of hate speech by being referred to as a shame that both sides “stigmatized” each other.
Journalist Yıldız Tar, one of the prominent figures of the LGBTIQA+ movement, characterized these LGBT-based debates between the ruling party and the opposition as a “contest of masculinity” and interpreted the counter discourses of Mansur Yavaş and Ekrem İmamoğlu, the mayors of the opposition bloc, as “you call us gay, but you are gay.” (https://kaosgl.org/gokkusagi-forumu-kose-yazisi/yavas-ve-imamoglu-na-acik-mektup) On the website of Kaos GL, one of the largest LGBT organizations in Turkey, even the length of the list compiling hate speech and rights violations against LGBTI+s in Turkey in April, when the election race heated up the most, can give us an idea about the new “scapegoat” of Turkish politics: https://kaosgl.org/haber/nisan-da-lgbti-lara-hak-ihlalleri-secim-yolunda-lgbti-dusmanligi
