President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Wednesday attended the congress of the women’s branch of his ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party). As he took the stage amid cheers from women around Türkiye, the president lauded how women fared under successive AK Party governments while slamming the opposition for failing to address the rights of women in the past.
Erdoğan is the guest of honor of AK Party congresses launched after the March 31 municipal elections that triggered the schedule as the party looks to regain losses in the vote, the first in years. At Wednesday’s event, he heaped praise on women who contributed to the rise of the AK Party. “Women have always been guides in our sacred struggle to serve the nation,” he told an enthusiastic crowd, often interrupting his speech with applause. The president said the congresses were simply an occasion for members to hand over their duties to new cadres, “unlike the opposition parties expelling old members.”
“We are not short-distance runners. We are fighting to strengthen our democracy and raise Türkiye’s profile. We are long-distance runners who cannot quit this race. Nor can we afford to offend people while serving people,” he said.
Erdoğan stated Türkiye has come a long way in 22 years of the AK Party governments, and it owed much to women. “We overcame challenges together. You contributed to great gains in terms of rights and freedoms, as well as democracy. (The AK Party) did not conduct politics for women. It conducted politics with women. We always attached importance to the opinion of women in every matter,” he said.
The president said women used to be deprived of a tangible spot in politics in the past and deprived of the right to be elected into office, referring to a ban on headscarf-wearing women. He said those women were also deprived of their rights to employment in the private and public sectors. “O CHP! Remember: you were the ones who set up persuasion rooms at universities,” Erdoğan said as he slammed the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP). He was referring to rooms in which headscarf-wearing university students were forced to remove their headscarves if they wanted to continue their education during the late 1990s and early 2000s, in a process marked by a so-called postmodern coup.
“They are now talking about women’s rights. You have a long way to go before talking about it,” Erdoğan said. He highlighted a witch-hunt campaign against headscarf-wearing women by the secular elite, from media outlets defaming them to lawmakers forcing headscarf-wearing women out of Parliament and military bases.
Erdoğan criticized the CHP in his speech, mocking that they were too “disconnected” from reality.
"They are so caught up in internal power struggles that they are unaware of what's happening even in our own region. If World War III were to break out, they wouldn't know. They tried to do something with a red card, but they only ended up making a mess of it,” he said.
He was referring to a “red card” campaign by CHP, which literally involves showing cards to protest the government’s “faulty” policies. “They have no interest in getting things done or producing anything. They've turned the party into a puppet for marginal left-wing groups. They attract every radical with no real purpose,” he said.
