In the run-up to Turkey’s presidential runoff election, the opposition, led by Kemal Kilicdaroglu, aims to win over women, particularly working-class housewives who have been a stronghold of Erdoğan’s support due to his religious policies.
A feminist voice rings out from behind the mounds of strawberries and olives in an Istanbul bazaar: “Let’s get rid of Erdoğan!”
“Defend your rights in the second round on May 28,” Rojda Aksoy, a slender figure in faded baggy clothes, calls out.
“Reis (the chief) will win!” barks back another woman who supports President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the “chief” who has ruled Turkey for two decades and fell just short of re-election in the first round of the vote on May 14.
The exchange was just one salvo in the battle for half of Turkey’s 64.1 million voters in its most consequential election of modern times.
With Erdogan’s hot favorite, the opposition is searching for votes to push secular leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu over the line in Sunday’s presidential runoff.
And if they are to do that, they will have to win over women, particularly working-class housewives—the bedrock of Erdoğan’s support.
Erdoğan’s removal of restrictions on religion in the primarily Muslim but officially secular republic turned the Islamic-rooted leader into a hero among Turkey’s conservatives.
His support among housewives, who can now wear the veil where they want, reached 60 percent in the last election 2018, according to an Ipsos survey—nearly eight points above his national vote.
But shopping with liras that lost value sharply in the past five years, these women are also sensitive to the price shocks of Turkey’s worst economic crisis since the 1990s.
Erdoğan struck a controversial alliance with the fringe Kurdish Islamic party to keep control of parliament.
Lacking the resources of Erdoğan’s ruling party, which has a stranglehold on the media, the opposition depends on social media to reach voters across the vast country, a strategy with particular drawbacks.
Miroslava Salazar with AFP
