Turkey’s Equality, Justice and Women’s Platform, a nongovernmental organization, said on Wednesday that political parties have nominated very few women for mayoral posts in local elections and that those who have been put forward are mostly underdogs, the Arti Gerçek news website reported.
The platform stressed that the female candidates were mostly nominated in districts where their chances of being elected were low, compared to the results of the 2014 local elections.
Turkey is ranked 113th among 149 countries in the 2018 Gender Equality Report released by the World Economic Forum.
According to data the platform presented, only 12 of 155 registered candidates of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) are women. In the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) the number is 29 out of 628. AKP ally the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) nominated 11 women for mayoral posts out of 410 registered candidates.
In addition, female politicians were generally nominated for district posts, not municipal positions.
In the cities, only one candidate was a woman among the AKP’s 75 announced nominees. In addition to that the CHP nominated just one woman for a city mayoral post among 44 other candidates for cities, whereas the MHP name three women for cities.
Overall in the three major parties less than 10 percent of the candidates are women, but not all candidates have yet been registered. In the MHP in particular, only 2.2 percent of all candidates are women.
At the current time a total of 3.5 percent of candidates in Meral Akşener’s İYİ (Good) Party are women.
The CHP has a 33 percent quota for women in mayoral posts, and it is expected that the party will nominate more women, especially for districts of the metropolitan cities.
The Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) has not yet revealed its candidates for the mayoral posts.