Gender, Family ‘Ideology’ and Authoritarian Populism in Türkiye

In the right-wing populist rhetoric, family has been deployed as a moral anchor for undermining an inclusionary gender regime. ‘Family under threat’ is strategically used in authoritarian populist narratives by portraying society—particularly women and children—as threatened by so-called ‘gender ideology.’ In familialistic societies like Türkiye, presenting the family as a moral anchor that unifies society serves as a political strategy (Weyland 2021), mobilising the majority around demographic and cultural anxieties related to low birth rates and the dissolution of the traditional family as a social institution. This manuscript examines the political narratives surrounding family, with a focus on the past five years within the context of escalating authoritarian populism highlighting its role as a “thin-centred ideology” (Mudde, 2004), strategically mobilised in both discursive and institutional sites. In framing family as a thin-centred ideology instrumental to authoritarian populist strategies, the authoritarian aspect of populism is particularly salient, given that authoritarianism prioritises collective security and national community over individual liberal autonomy (Norris and Inglehart, 2019). As documented in the literature, anti-gender movements (Corredor, 2019) cast LGBT+, feminist, liberal, and other actors as menaces to an idealised social order, with family positioned as the central moral safeguard. In this context, this manuscript focuses on political narratives to analyse the articulation of family as a thin-centred ideology, utilising Ferree’s (2009) feminist frame analysis framework. Ferree emphasises how framing assigns meaning to concepts in relation to one another, while simultaneously shaping institutionalised frameworks—such as laws, treaties, and regulations—into authoritative texts that create 'discursive opportunity structures,' enabling political narratives to delineate what is considered 'normal' versus 'non-normal’. This study employs a sequential analytical approach, focusing on the period 2020–2025 and seeking to establish an ‘applicable’ dialogue in different cases. Key events—including Turkey’s withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention in 2021, the emergence of pro-family movements, and the designation of 2025 as the 'Family Year'—are treated as marker events that structure the temporal unfolding of political processes in our analysis. Our empirical study centres on key presidential speeches, significant policy documents from the Ministry of Family and Social Services, and reports produced by pro-family NGOs.