ISTANBUL— Largely gone unnoticed during the contested mayoral election in Istanbul, for the first time in Turkish history, female candidates managed to win in more neighbourhoods than men in a district, Turkey’s largest administrative unit after a province. The neighbourhoods of Kadıköy, a district of Istanbul with over half a million inhabitants, will now be ruled by 12 female mukhtars and nine male counterparts, reported bianet.
The Kadıköy district on the Asian side of Istanbul already had 10 female mukthars, heads of a neighbourhood, before the March 31 municipal elections but in two of the three neighbourhoods where the mukhtar changed, female candidates took over. In a country in which only 17.4% of MPs are women — the global average is 24% — and barely eight per cent of municipal politicians are women, this is a very significant development. This could well be the beginning of a trend in which women play a bigger role in Turkish politics in Istanbul and other urban centers like Ankara and Izmir.
The cosmopolitan Kadıköy district faces the historic city centre of Istanbul on the European side of the Bosporus. Kadıköy is also the name of the most prominent neighbourhood of the district, a residential and commercial area with numerous bars, cinemas and bookshops, and the cultural centre of the Anatolian side of Istanbul. The centre-left Republican People’s Party (CHP) is usually successful in Kadıköy in both local and national elections. Since the mid-1990s the mayor has been from the CHP. The CHP traditionally has been much more open to women and women’s political representation than the conservative AKP.
Outside Istanbul women have been successful in the location election too. The left-wing Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) has won the elections in three metropolitan, five city and 46 district municipalities, according to the latest figures from the state-run Anadolu Agency. Using the co-chairpersonship system, the party nominated both a woman and a man for each of the municipalities that it ran for office. Although only one person can be officially nominated for a municipality, a co-chair can come into office after the elections. In five districts that HDP won in the southeastern province Mardin, all five candidates were women.
