The exact date of the presidential and legislative elections is not yet known, and yet Turkey is already living to the rhythm of electoral slogans and political maneuvers. In a video posted on social networks in early October, the leader of the secular Kemalist opposition Kemal Kiliçdaroglu (CHP, Republican People’s Party) proposed to submit a bill to Parliament to guarantee the right to wear the veil.
A step backwards from the traditional positions of his party on the issue which surprised even his own camp. «The road to reconciliation in Turkey is difficult and bumpy, and we must walk it together. One of these plagues is the question of the veil. (…) Starting tomorrow, we will take a step that will close this wound forever. We will submit our bill to Parliament,” he thus declared.
Wearing the veil banned in 1980 then gradually reauthorized
In Turkey, the majority of the population declares itself to be of the Muslim faith, even if there are numerous religious minorities. The principle of secularism was formally added to the Constitution in 1937. The wearing of the veil was then prohibited in the wake of the coup d’etat of September 12, 1980 by a regulation on «dress code in the public sector». Veiled women (estimated at 57-70% of women in Turkey) were denied access to public schools and universities as well as public administration jobs.
Secular circles – often denounced as “secular” by conservative Muslims – and the heirs of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of modern Turkey, have long seen the veil as a Trojan horse of political Islam, a threat to the republic. . On February 28, 1997, it was in the name of the protection of the Turkish Republic that the military intervened to overthrow the government led by the Islamo-conservative party of Refah (Party of Prosperity).
Representing the Islamo-conservative segment of Turkish society since its accession to parliament in 2002, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP (ruling Justice and Development Party) immediately made the defense of port rights of the veil one of its main battles. After several milestones on the path to liberalisation, the government ended the ban on the wearing of the veil in public administrations in 2013.
The crucial issue of undecided voters
Despite some wear and tear, after twenty years in power, the AKP is still credited with 31.9% of voting intentions, far ahead of the country’s second party, credited with 20.4%, according to the Metropoll polling institute. Undecided voters – 12.1% of the electorate – will be a crucial issue in the upcoming elections.
By proposing to go further than simply lifting the ban, Kemal Kiliçdaroglu’s CHP is reaching out to «worried conservatives, a category of the electorate ambivalent in the face of the possibility of the coming to power of the opposition in the 2023 elections. For a year, the CHP has been trying to develop the idea of a broad national reconciliation (“let’s be gentle”) with the different sections of society that have been oppressed by the state apparatus.
Following Kemal Kiliçdaroglu’s bill, Recep Tayyip Erdogan played the one-upmanship card. At the end of October, during a televised intervention, the Turkish president thus proposed the holding of a new referendum for a constitutional change which would guarantee the freedom to wear the veil. The Head of State also specified that this new text would include “protecting the family” against the threat posed to him by LGBTI movements.