Turkey's election In search of the female voter

Jul 12th 2007 | ANKARA AND ISTANBUL
From The Economist print edition
Women will have an important role in Turkey's election on July 22nd


IN ISTANBUL'S Carsamba district, women in head-to-toe chadors trail obediently behind bearded men sporting Islamic caps and baggy trousers. Shop windows are crammed with Islamic memorabilia from Mecca. Many secular women fret that, if Recep Tayyip Erdogan's mildly Islamist Justice and Development (AK) Party, which has run Turkey since 2002, wins the election on July 22nd, all of Ataturk's republic may resemble Carsamba.

Turkey's bossy generals and the secular opposition are doing their utmost to encourage such fears. Their tactics sometimes work. Many of those who joined the wave of pro-secular rallies before Mr Erdogan called an early election were urban, middle-class women, who also supported the army's April 27th threat to intervene over the choice of a president whose wife wears the Muslim headscarf.

But if the same ladies thumbed through a study of Turkish women by the Berlin-based European Stability Initiative, their notions about Islam and modernity might change. Entitled “Sex and Power in Turkey”, the paper deconstructs the myth that Ataturk was the sole champion of Turkish women. Certainly, they owe him a huge debt: he made women equal before the law and gave them the right to vote earlier of their counterparts in France and Switzerland, thereby making Turkish women unquestionably freer than any of their sisters in the Muslim world.

Yet the paper notes that such changes “barely penetrated Turkish society beyond a small urban elite”, and patriarchy remained entrenched in both civil and criminal law. Despite growing numbers of women in banking, medicine and academia, Turkey lags behind other European countries on most measures of gender equality. It has the smallest share of women in parliament and the workforce, and the highest rate of female illiteracy. Violence against women is on the rise: the police report a big rise last year, when 842 women were murdered and 1,113 raped.

Awkwardly for secularists, it took the AK government to pass the most radical set of women's reforms since Ataturk. Husbands are no longer officially heads of household, and wives no longer need their consent to work. Laws letting rapists off the hook if they married their victims have gone; new ones make intra-marital rape a criminal offence and scrap reduced sentences for honour killings.

The AK Party's enthusiasm for women's lib may even cost it votes among its more pious constituents. In Carsamba many promise to back the overtly Islamist Saadet party (which is expected to take no more than 2% of the vote). Yet critics still claim that AK's reformist zeal is driven less by conviction than by a wish to please the European Union. As evidence, they cite Mr Erdogan's failed bid to criminalise adultery three years ago.

Hulya Gulbahar, a lawyer who helped to co-ordinate women who were lobbying parliament for reform, says they faced more resistance from the secular Republican People's Party (CHP) than from AK. Tellingly, only 10% of CHP's parliamentary candidates are women. Admittedly, AK does little better. Edibe Sozen, an academic who is among 62 women (out of 550 candidates) fielded by AK, acknowledges that “changing the [patriarchal] mentality is not as easy as changing the laws.”

The judiciary is another problem. Recently, in the case of a woman who was raped by her neighbour, the presiding judge in an appeal court opined that she must have “consented” because she had “not screamed or shouted” during the act. “She kept silent so as not to upset her children,” fumes a lawyer, Fatma Benli. Miss Benli is fighting the ban on the Muslim headscarf in government offices and schools. Shedding her headscarf and overcoat to reveal a lace-trimmed top and a shock of auburn curls, she is indistinguishable in looks and rhetoric from female human-rights campaigners in the West.

Miss Benli, who cannot defend her clients in court because of her garb, argues that, before the headscarf ban in 1998, universities were among the few places where secular and devout Turkish women could mix. “The [headscarf ban] not only polarises society, it runs counter to the very purpose it claims to serve: to modernise Turkish women,” she insists.