Learning from the Opposition: How Anti-LGBTI Authoritarianism Recalibrates Through Democratic Vulnerabilities in Turkey

This paper examines the anti-LGBTI authoritarian turn in Turkey by analyzing how opposition actors from the Republican People’s Party (CHP) both resist and become implicated in its reproduction. Employing Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis, it studies posts on X (formerly Twitter) in which opposition figures responded to the homophobic provocations of former Ankara mayor and Justice and Development Party (AKP) politician İbrahim Melih Gökçek. In recent years, Gökçek has sought to discredit CHP parliamentarian Ali Mahir Başarır, whose outspoken criticism of government corruption made him a visible opposition figure, by weaponizing his support for LGBTI rights. Initially, the opposition displayed democratic resilience, countering the AKP’s anti-LGBTI accusations with rights-based arguments grounded in equality and constitutional freedoms. Gökçek then shifted from ideological condemnations to intimate insinuations—publicly asking on X whether Başarır would want his own children to be gay and later suggesting he had attended gay parties abroad. Faced with this intimate turn, opposition leaders responded defensively through reinscribing cisheteropatriarchal shame–honor paradigm—insisting that Başarır was a “family man,” denying any association with queer spaces, and emphasizing their own heterosexual respectability. In turn, by learning from both the resilience and the vulnerabilities of the opposition, the AKP recalibrated its homophobic strategy in real time and subsequently recast the pro-LGBTI opposition as rooted in a “native and national homophobic essence”—portraying them affectively as “as homophobic as every Turk,” discursively mimicking “foreign” norms, and branding them as hypocritical elites, “White Turks” with a colonial mentality. In doing so, the AKP consolidated heteronormativity as the nation’s moral common sense, neutralizing opposition defenses and revealing the limits of rights-based appeals when confronted with the intimate registers of homophobia. By treating opposition discourse as a site of analysis rather than of blame, I argue that both the resilience and the vulnerabilities of opponents enable authoritarian regimes to recalibrate their ostensibly standstill anti-gender politics. This paper thus seeks to reframe anti-LGBTI mobilization less as a far-right or ruling-party anomalous resurgence and more as an index of the unraveling of oppositional power, thereby aiming to contribute to broader debates on anti-gender politics and democratic erosion.