Ten years ago, Emine Kilic was focusing on raising her two children at home in Istanbul when she decided to start her own clothing company to help support her family.
Kilic, who had an elementary school education, said her business, which started with interest-free government-backed loans for women entrepreneurs, now employs 60 people and exports to 15 countries. She credited President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as her strong motivator for changing her life, calling him a champion of women.
“Thanks to the president, I was able to become president of my own company,” said Kilic, 38. She said she has voted for him for years but voted again on Sunday to help him secure another term in office.
To fend off the most serious political threat to his 20-year tenure as Turkey’s leading politician, Mr. Erdogan has relied on the fervent support of an often undervalued constituency: conservative religious women. I was counting on it.
Across Turkey, religious women, both professional and non-employed, not only voted for Mr. Erdoğan in large numbers, but persuaded their friends and relatives to do the same. His ruling Justice and Development Party employs women across the country, from activists spreading the party’s message to neighbors over tea, to the dozens of women who represent the party in parliament. There is.
What connects these women to Mr. Erdogan is a shared conservative Muslim view of women’s role in Turkish society – first as mothers and wives, and secondly, as members of the workforce. In a staunchly secular country where women who cover their hair have long been barred from universities and government jobs, many devout women see him as their protector because he has pushed to relax those rules.
“Voting in Turkey, especially for our community, doesn’t just mean electing someone. It’s making a decision about your life,” said a senior member of Mr. Erdoğan’s party. said Ozlem Zengin, a female lawmaker.
For many conservative women, the pain of having their ambitions restricted by publicly expressing their faith runs deep, even affecting the children of those who experience it, she said. That resentment also stirs an immense sense of gratitude toward Mr. Erdogan.
“The reason President Erdogan is so loved is because he changed people’s lives,” Zengin said.
Tensions erupted between Erdogan and his female supporters at a conference center in Istanbul during a women’s rally, two days before the May 28 runoff election. Thousands of women, some with babies and children, packed the hall, clapping, waving their arms, singing hymns and holding up cell phone flashlights to welcome him to the stage.
“Women are the most important heroes in our struggle to serve our country,” Erdoğan said to thunderous applause.
He reminded the audience that he has achieved conservative causes, such as lifting the ban on headscarves and transforming Hagia Sophia, one of Turkey’s architectural treasures, from a museum to a mosque. He also drew even more cheers with his new pledge to demand retirement benefits for women who don’t work outside the home.
“We’re going to burst the ballot box,” Erdogan said. “Don’t go alone. Your family, neighbors and distant relatives must also go to the ballot box.”
“Women too!” the crowd chanted.
Mr. Erdogan’s loyal support among conservatives is rooted in Turkey’s history.
Although the country is a Muslim-majority society, it was founded in 1923 as a secular state. This gave the government the power to monitor religious institutions and prevent overt displays of religiosity from public spaces.
Some Turks cherish their secularism as a founding pillar of the republic. However, it irritated many religious people, including women, who felt it made them second-class citizens. Some women had to remove their veils to attend university. Some were wearing wigs.
Sengin said he was not even allowed to enter the courtroom because he covered his hair and has been working as a lawyer for 20 years.
“If you’re a defendant or a victim, you can go into court, but you can’t go in as a lawyer,” she says. “It was incomprehensible.”
Since Erdogan burst onto the national stage as an ambitious Islamist politician in 2003, he has sidelined Turkey’s secular elite and consolidated more power in his own hands. Along the way, he pushed for the relaxation of headscarf regulations.
Restrictions on university campuses were lifted in 2008, and in 2013 four veiled women from Mr. Erdogan’s party became the first members of parliament. Now there are many more, but conservatives still thank Mr. Erdoğan for their votes.
“I feel like I owe him something,” said kindergarten teacher Eda Yurtseven. “I am very grateful to him because now I can live freely.”
Erdogan’s views on family remain conservative, sacrosanct the concept of marriage only between a man and a woman, preferably with three children, and his idea of individual freedom leaves little room for LGBTQ people in Turkey.
“We believe that the family is sacred,” he told the women’s rally. “We must now take precautions against this trend that is spreading like an epidemic.”
Turkey’s constitution grants equal rights to men and women and labor laws prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender, but a United Nations report last year found that women still earn 15.6 percent less on average than men.
In 2021, Erdogan shocked human rights groups by withdrawing Turkey from the international convention on the prevention of violence against women, which he signed in 2011. Women’s advocacy groups consider the country’s domestic violence laws to be strong, but say physical and sexual abuse of women remains common and frequent. It is either not reported or not properly investigated by the authorities.
Female political representation has increased under Erdogan’s tenure, with women winning about 120 seats in the 600-seat parliament in elections this month. Still, most women work in campaign, communications or advocacy roles, rather than high-level decision-making, according to the U.N. report.
Erdogan has been a pioneer in harnessing the power of devout, conservative women in grassroots politics in Turkey, said Nur Sinem Kourou, a professor at Istanbul University of Culture who has studied the party’s women’s groups. She said many of the women are active in their hometowns, spreading the party’s views through informal meetings and religious activities and gathering information to feed back to the party.
“The fact that the women’s chapters are out there every week and every day means that they are analyzing society very well,” Kuhl said. “That data goes back to President Erdoğan’s televised speech.”
These activists maintain fierce loyalty to Mr. Erdogan and believe he holds the key to Turkey’s future, she added.
“We have to protect him,” Kuhl said, summing up their thoughts. “President Erdogan will protect us.”
This bond is due to the tendency of Mr. Erdogan’s most ardent female supporters to pass on the country’s problems, including the painful cost of living crisis, to him and instead blame other party members or foreign powers. It means.
Mr. Erdogan’s opponents say he has acquired too much power and accuse him of steering the country towards one-man rule. However, his vast control does not trouble his supporters. On the contrary, they say that he needs it to do his job.
Mina Murat, 26, said she voted because Erdogan and his party protected her right to cover her hair.
“My teachers wore headscarves and wigs on their heads at school,” she recalled. “Women couldn’t go to university or get government jobs because of the headscarves.”
Murat now works in a clothing store that caters to conservative women, selling head scarves in a variety of colors and patterns.
“Now we can dress fashionably and conservatively,” she said.
