President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan proposed holding a referendum to solve the headscarf issue on a constitutional basis, in response to Turkish main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) Chairperson Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu’s law proposal.
Speaking at a grand inauguration ceremony in Malatya province, the president said they could hold a referendum on the headscarf issue.
“We could also do this ... If you dare, let’s hold a referendum,” he said.
But Kılıçdaroğlu didn’t take too long to turn down Erdoğan’s proposal:
“Support our draft bill. What referendum are you talking about? What now, are you trying to act like a fake (Victor) Orban? If you don’t run away we can solve this issue,” the CHP chairperson said on Twitter.
Kılıçdaroğlu unexpectedly revived the issue of headscarves earlier this month, announcing planned legislation amid efforts by his secularist CHP party to reach out to conservative Turks, among which the CHP has traditionally had little support.
“One of these wounds is the headscarf issue,” he said, admitting that the CHP has made mistakes in the past.
“It is time to leave this issue behind. We created a statutory framework compatible with universal law principles. We take out the issue of women’s clothing from the monopolization of politics,” Kılıçdaroğlu said. The CHP announced that it submitted the bill to Parliament.
Instead of a bill, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) sought to make constitutional amendments to guarantee the right to wear headscarves. Justice Minister Bekir Bozdağ announced he would present the works on a new constitutional-level headscarf regulation to the president.
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."
Türkiye's Parliament lifted a ban on female students wearing the headscarf at university in 2008 in a move championed by Erdoğan and which the CHP lawmakers, including Kılıçdaroğlu, had sought unsuccessfully to block in the constitutional court.
In 2013, Türkiye lifted a ban on women wearing headscarves in state institutions under reforms that the government said were designed to bolster democracy.
