President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Thursday launched a new attack against Turkey’s LGBTQ community as he played up his conservative credentials ahead of a crucial May 14 vote.
Turkey’s longest-serving leader has been campaigning tirelessly since bouncing back from a health scare that sidelined him for three days last week.
Polls show the 69-year-old running neck-and-neck with leftist secular leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu in one of Turkey’s most important election races of its post-Ottoman history.
Erdogan’s campaign is being hamstrung by a raging economic crisis and discontent over the government’s response to a February earthquake that claimed more than 50,000 lives across Turkey’s southeast.
He has punched back by launching daily barbs at both the West and the opposition’s support for liberal causes such as LGBTQ and women’s rights.
“We are against the LGBT,” Erdogan told a rally in the Black Sea city of Giresun on Thursday.
“Family is sacred to us. A strong family means a strong nation. No matter what they do, God is enough for us.”
Kilicdaroglu and his six-party coalition have tried to run a more inclusive campaign that does not respond to Erdogan’s comments and instead focuses on its own messages.
These include healing Turkey’s social divisions and polarisation among its myriad of communities.
The 74-year-old has also pledged to restore economic order and secure new funding from Western investors who abandoned Turkey in the latter years of Erdogan’s rule.
Erdogan ran a more muted campaign when Turkey was officially in mourning for its earthquake victims.
But his message has become more divisive and heated as the election nears.
“He is once again trying to unify the masses behind him by whipping up perpetual culture wars,” the Middle East Institute’s Turkey programme director Gonul Tol told AFP.
“He campaigns at mosques, falsely claims the opposition will close down the Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet), and ostracises the LGBTQ community by describing them as polluted by ‘viruses’ and ‘perverts.'”
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