If it was up to the Turkish president, Talia Aydin probably wouldn’t exist. The 26-year-old is a parliamentary candidate with the Turkish Workers’ Party (TİP) and has openly declared that she is transgender. Aydin is one of the people the Turkish president refers to almost every day just before the elections. During his campaign speech, Tayyip Erdogan said that “this country has no LGBTI community”, threatening to teach “a lesson” to its supporters.

LGBT (English: LGBT) is an acronym derived from the words Lesbian, Homosexual, Bisexual and Trans, being a hostile term for the Turkish president. He can be sure that this will count with religious-conservative voters. Statements of this kind towards queer people are not new, however. For years, Tayyip Erdogan and Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu have fueled hostility towards queer people, publicly calling them “perverts” and equating them with terrorist organizations. Soilou recently stated that the LGBT community is in favor of marrying animals.

What may seem absurd to some, gets through to some voters. In the summer of 2022, as a result of provocation by the government in many cities of the country, people took to the streets, demanding, among other things, the prohibition of “gay propaganda”. When transgender woman Celine Djigerji wanted to open a beauty salon in the city of Iconium, a mob gathered in front of her house and aggressively asked her to leave the city.

Turkey is on the verge of a major change

Turkish Workers’ Party (TİP) candidate Aydin wants to address exactly this issue. “I can’t accept that I feel less safe now than when I was 14 and people thought I was a boy,” she says. She is not afraid to be in public as transgender. “I am not the one who should fear them, they should fear a righteous judge in the future.”

But a few months ago, she herself would not have believed that she would be able to govern in a country under Erdoğan. That he does it despite all that surprised her positively. The self-proclaimed socialist focuses on equality – regardless of social class, economic resources and gender. She is sure that Turkey is on the verge of a big change. So is Oiku Didem Aydin. Oikou has represented many queer people in court. The country’s judiciary is corrupt, the government politicizes homophobia to rally voters. “There is a pogrom atmosphere in Turkey, people are being targeted,” says Oiku Aydin.

According to the organization “Transrespect”, Turkey leads the statistics of European countries, having the highest rate of murders of transgender people. Women are also underrepresented in politics. Under Erdogan’s government, the country withdrew from the 2011 Istanbul Convention on preventing and combating violence against women.

Islamist parties are against feminism

Erdogan is now hoping to win the election with the support of all the Islamist parties, which are incorporating anti-feminist agendas into their campaigns. The Kurdish Islamist Huda Par, for example, wants to protect the “traditional” family from “deviant” ideologies, to teach boys and girls separately and to offer women working conditions that correspond to their “nature”. The Islamist “New Prosperity Party”, as part of its election campaign, uses a bus in which male candidates appear with a photo of themselves while only a shadow of a female candidate is visible.

Women and queer people fear that if Erdogan is re-elected, their situation will worsen again. Denise Altuntas from the Center for Women and Family Research at Kadir Has University, points out that it is clear that the threats will not only remain at the verbal level, but could take the form of violence. “Imagine every day a politician threatening you during his speech, claiming you don’t exist, describing you as a threat to society.” If the current government continues like this, further curtailment of rights and freedoms is inevitable.