Overriding appeals from activists, Turkey’s Islamist-rooted ruling party has refused to support veiled women in parliament ahead of upcoming elections, despite its ardent advocacy of the headscarf as a religious freedom.
“The headscarf issue should never be a subject of bargaining to enter parliament ... Such campaigns are improper,” Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Wednesday.
He was reacting to a campaign called, “No votes if no veiled candidates,” launched by female activists ahead of the June 12 general elections to push parties to support veiled women members of parliament.
Erdogan’s wife and two daughters wear the Islamic headscarf and his Justice and Development Party (AKP), the moderate offshoot of a banned Islamist movement, has long slammed restrictions on the veil in secular Turkey as a breach of freedom of conscience.
The issue has long polarized the country, where hardline secularists, backed by the influential army, view the headscarf as a symbol of defiance of the secular system.
Even though parliamentary rules do not explicitly ban the headscarf, its adversaries argue the legislature is a public realm off-limits for the divisive religious wear.
A sole woman who covers her head found a place this week among the AKP candidates who will contest the elections — but only at the bottom of the list in a province where she stands almost no chance of winning.
Teacher Gulderen Gultekin failed to get a better berth even though she signaled she was ready to take off her headscarf in parliament, as she currently does at school under existing laws.
“I will do whatever is good for my party and my country,” Gultekin said.
Frustrated by Erdogan’s stance, veiled intellectuals charged that the prime minister regarded the headscarf as a hindrance in luring less conservative center-right voters and for his future political ambitions.
The AKP “aims to win 42 percent of the vote and is staying away from veiled deputies because it regards them as an obstacle. It wants to have the support of the pro-status quo segments of society,” said newspaper columnist Hilal Kaplan, a spokeswoman for the headscarf campaign.
“After the elections, a debate on a presidential system will start and they do not want the headscarf issue to overshadow it,” she said, referring to Erdogan’s proposal to introduce such a system in Turkey.
Political analyst Tarhan Erdem also said that the AKP viewed the headscarf as a risk in its quest to win a third-straight term in power.
“They see that bringing the issue to the political agenda would disturb public opinion and do not want to shoulder that burden,” he said.
According to opinion polls, half of Turkish women cover their heads — some with the tight Islamic headscarf concealing all the hair and others with loosely worn traditional garments.
Universities were long the main battleground on the issue, but a ban on wearing the headscarf on campus was notably relaxed recently after the AKP took control of a body supervising higher education.
In 2008, the AKP narrowly escaped being outlawed for anti-secular activities in a court case in which its failed attempt to formally abolish the headscarf ban in universities figured as a key prosecution argument.
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