Turkey: Kilicdaroglu tries to attract housewives

As the second round of the presidential election in Turkey approaches, the opposition is trying in every way to win over female voters, mainly housewives, who traditionally prefer Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

In the elections, housewives prefer Erdogan, under whose government came the ban on women wearing headscarves in universities and the public sector. In the 2018 elections, according to a report, 69% of housewives voted for the Turkish president.

But with their wallets full of devalued notes, they all know the increased price of onions and live under the weight of high inflation.

"We have to meet them, remind them that although (Erdogan and the Islamic conservative AKP party) have been ruling the country for more than 20 years, despite the fact that they have all the propaganda tools, including the media, they have not won ", explains Royda Aksoy, a feminist who supports the opposition candidate Kemal Kilicdaroglu.

But the CHP leader and advocate of the secular state with his campaign videos showing him in his kitchen managed to attract only 44,9% of voters in the first round of the election on 14 May.

50-year-old Çigdem Ener was not one of them: in the first round she chose a third man, the ultra-nationalist Sinan Ogan.

"Turkey is a secular state, it gave women the right to vote and be elected" as early as the 1930s, he recalls. "And look at the sad point Erdogan has brought us to by allowing his friends from Huda-Par," a Kurdish Islamist party, to enter parliament.

In the second round, Ener will vote for Kilicdaroglu.

Thijen Albanli will do the same, but because she agrees with his views. "Women are murdered, almost none of the murderers are punished," emphasizes the 60-year-old woman, who is also worried about the presence of Islamists in Erdogan's coalition.

Instead, Razige Kuskaya, 50, and her daughter will support "Tayyip until the last drop of our blood." "Maybe we can't buy everything we want, but it's not serious," says this supporter of sharia, Islamic law.

Door to door

From Van to Eskisehir supporters of Kilicdaroglu are trying to convince the deeply polarized voters.

"We know that there are groups that we fail to reach, mainly housewives," Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, who also belongs to the CHP, admitted last week.

Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) has been sending women to knock on household doors for two decades. His wife, Emine Erdogan, was one of the leaders of this movement.

Erdoğan believes that "women can visit other women, talk to them and persuade them, because between AKP activists and housewives there are commonalities because of their gender, values ​​and class," explains Prunelle Aimé Ph.D. of political science at CERI-Sciences Po in Paris.

There are now more than five million female AKP activists.

As part of their duties, they visit households for births, marriages or deaths, which allows them to bond with the housewives and gather information, adds Aimé.

Moreover, the common households have benefited mainly from the municipal family and social centers, which have made the AKP popular at the local level, he recalls.

But the AKP lost about 20 seats in the May 14 election, "so we can be optimistic," Aksoy concludes.

Source: RES-EAP