The constitutional amendment proposal on headscarves and defining conjugal unions was submitted to Parliament Speaker Mustafa Şentop on Friday, said Özlem Zengin, the vice-chair of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party).
Zengin said during a press briefing at the Parliament in the capital Ankara that the bill was signed by 366 deputies in the 600-seat Parliament. The AK Party and its nationalist allies have 334 seats.
"The headscarf issue is the most important element of the presence of the AK Party. Our approach toward this issue cannot be political," she added.
The headscarf was once a source of deep discord in Türkiye – its once-powerful secular establishment saw it as a threat to the secular order. But the question ceased to stir controversy after reforms by the AK Party during its 20 years in power.
However, the secularist Republican People’s Party (CHP), a party that long opposed the wearing of headscarves in Parliament and public offices, revived the issue in October with a proposal to enshrine the right with legislation, in an attempt to attract support from conservative voters.
Instead of a bill, the AK Party sought to make constitutional amendments to guarantee the right to wear headscarves once and for all. Raising the stakes, the president said the amendment would also encompass measures to protect the family.
Turkish headscarf-wearing women have long struggled under laws that prevented them from wearing headscarves at schools as students and in public institutions as professionals, despite the prevalence of headscarf-wearing women in the country. The CHP had fueled anti-headscarf sentiment among the people and supported laws banning it.
The issue of the headscarf ban held an important place in public and political debates in Türkiye throughout the 1990s and 2000s.
The headscarf ban in Türkiye was first implemented widely in the 1980s but became stricter after 1997 when the military forced the conservative government to resign in an incident later dubbed the Feb. 28 "postmodern coup."
Parliament lifted the ban on female students wearing the headscarf at university in 2008 in a move championed by Erdoğan and which the CHP lawmakers, including CHP Chairperson Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, had sought unsuccessfully to block in the constitutional court.
In 2013, Türkiye lifted the ban on women wearing headscarves in state institutions under reforms that the government said were designed to bolster democracy.
