Turkish women struggle to get elected

Before the July 22 legislative vote, women's groups push for more equity on male-dominated ballots.

from the July 11, 2007 edition

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Istanbul, Turkey - Nursuna Memecan, a well-known Istanbul businesswoman, surprised her friends with the recent announcement that she would be running in Turkey's July 22 parliamentary elections.

Her friends were even more surprised when they found out the secular-minded Ms. Memecan would be running on the ticket of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), an Islamic-rooted party that for the last few months has been facing increasing criticism that it is working to erode Turkey's secular foundations.

But it's not surprising that the AKP would pick someone like Memecan as a candidate – and not just to deflect charges that the party is antisecular. Her presence also helps the party respond to an increasingly loud demand for women to enter politics in Turkey, which has the lowest percentage of women in parliament in all of Europe.

"This election is special because everyone has realized the importance of women," says Aysegul Tuncer Topal, an Istanbul businesswoman who is deputy chairman of the city's AKP branch. "If you look at the business world and in other fields, women have started to have a more prominent role in the last ten years and political parties have started to pay attention to that."

Several mammoth pro-secularism rallies – some drawing well over a million people – were held in cities around Turkey in April and May, and women were a vocal and highly-visible part of them.

Also, in recent months, the Association for Supporting and Training Women Candidates, a Turkish nongovernmental agency known as KA-DER, launched a popular media campaign featuring famous Turkish women with bushy mustaches drawn on their faces. "Is this what you need to get into parliament?" the campaign's slick ads and billboards asked.

Although Turkish women were given the right to vote in 1934, ahead of many other countries in Europe, critics say progress has been stalled since then. The average level of women's representation in the parliament has been 2.2 percent since 1935 and currently stands at a paltry 4.4 percent, one of the lowest rates in the world. On the local level, only 18 of Turkey's 3,234 elected mayors (0.56 percent) are women.

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