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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By comparison, 47 percent of Swedish parliamentarians are women while in Bulgaria, Turkey's neighbor to the west, women make up 22 percent of the parliament.

"Politics in Turkey is very much a man's game," says Nukhet Sirman, an anthropologist at Istanbul's Bogazici University who is active in the women's movement in Turkey. "Therefore a woman cannot be a proper actor there. She cannot play the game the way the men do."

Memecan says she believes the AKP is a natural fit for her. "They are very open-minded. They are really looking to make Turkey a more democratic state with greater respect for human rights and women's rights," she says.

In the wake of the large rallies and the campaign by KA-DER, the female candidates' group, several of Turkey's parties scrambled to promote their image as women-friendly. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister and AKP's leader, even promised a woman candidate in each one of Turkey's 81 provinces.

But women's organizations expressed disappointment when parties' candidate lists were announced in early June. Despite Prime Minister Erdogan's promise, AKP fielded only 63 women candidates, representing 11 percent of its total. And women made up only 10 percent of the candidates of the next largest party, the secularist Republican People's Party (CHP).

More troubling to many activists was where the women were placed on the lists. Parties fill their allotted seats in parliament starting at the top of their candidate lists in each voting district, and, although many parties fielded more women, most of the ones on the AKP's and CHP's lists were at the bottom, making their election to parliament highly unlikely.

"Part of the political system is terribly undemocratic, since it's the party leader who decides what the candidates' list will look like and these men will not name women as candidates, or will only name a small number of women just so they can be seen there," says Sirman.

Many Turkish women are now calling for the institution of a quota system in the parliament and other other political bodies to ensure gender parity.

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