Securitization of the LGBTI+ Community Through Religious Populism: Case of the 2023 Turkish Elections

Last May, Türkiye experienced one of the most critical elections in its recent history. One of the most significant aspects of the elections was the electoral campaign of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP), which was designed to further polarize the society and convince the electorate based on divisive identity politics. This study investigates how and why the AKP and its electoral allies have securitized the LGBTI+ community through religious populism in the 2023 Turkish elections. The AKP and its religious-oriented allies (such as; the New Welfare Party, [Yeniden Refah Partisi, YRP]) presented the LGBTI+ community as a threat to traditional values, family life, and even the national and religious unity of the society. While doing this, the opposition was also depicted as supporters of the LGBTI+ community, which also equally threatens the same values. By securitizing the LGBTI+ community as a threat and presenting the opposition as its collaborator, the AKP and its allies aimed to design a divisive political discourse in the election campaign and win the votes of the religious-conservative electorate. The main purpose of this study is twofold. First, it aims to analyze how the AKP and its allies used securitization of the LGBTI+ community among the voters as an electoral strategy to discredit the opposition. Secondly, it intends to frame this analysis into a religious-populist discourse in order to understand the role religious and cultural factors play in the AKP’s and its allies’ choice to securitize the LGBTI+ community. In this sense, this study will use the securitization theory as a theoretical framework to understand the role of the speech act on the construction of threats for the members of the society and also to make sense of how populists use securitization as a method of polarizing the society. In the case of methodology, the study will be carried out by a critical discourse analysis to analyze the political narrative of the AKP and its allies throughout the election campaign that led to the construction of the LGBTI+ community as a threat to the values, norms, and existence of the society.