13th Istanbul Reclaim the Night Feminist March
Turkey will hold general elections on June 7, and the stakes are high. For its part, the ruling Justice and Development Party (JDP) seems confident that it will, for the fourth time in a row, be victorious. Its success at the ballot box allows the party to claim that it represents “the national will.” The party's leaders have argued that an electoral victory in June will give JDP the mandate to change the country's constitution. President Erdoğan, the party's former leader and now Turkey's president, makes no secret of his plans to establish a presidential system in Turkey, which will further concentrate power in the executive branch and give him even more power. This is the “new Turkey” that JDP envisions.
Critical voices within Turkey, on the other hand, warn against a turn toward authoritarianism under the cloak of democracy – and with good reason. The political process in Turkey is increasingly marked by non-transparency, self-interest, arbitrary decisions, and exclusion of critical civil societal forces from decision-making processes. While it is true that the party has registered many electoral victories since 2002, the government's brutal repression of the Gezi protests of 2013, in which women's and LGBTI movements played a crucial part, gave the lie to JDP's claim to represent democratic forces in Turkey.
