Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan delivers a speech during a meeting of Justice and Development Party parliamentarians at the Grand National Assembly of Turkey in Ankara on Feb, 20. (Adem Altan/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images)
The growing rift between Turkey and Europe could have an unexpected side effect: making adultery a crime for Turks.
On Feb. 20, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared that his country should criminalize adultery in conjunction with a drive to increase penalties on child abuse. “Those who commit these crimes must be excluded from the possibility of reduced sentences. Wounds inflicted on society are the same as killing a person,” Erdogan said, according to Turkey's Hurriyet Daily News. “By making a regulation on adultery, all of those abuses would be considered within the same scope,” he added.
Erdogan's Justice and Development Party, or AKP, had tried to make adultery illegal in 2004 (it had been officially criminalized from 1926 to 1996), but the proposal was scrapped after it sparked a battle with the European Union and threatened talks about Turkey's bid to join the union. Those talks have all but collapsed since a 2016 coup attempt against Erdogan and his subsequent crackdowns and purges of perceived enemies.
Erdogan said he now considers bowing to European pressure to be a mistake. “This society holds a different status in terms of its moral values,” he said at an AKP meeting last week. “This is an issue where Turkey is different from most Western countries.” Presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin said on Feb. 21 that Turkey's justice ministry is drafting a regulation on adultery.
Turkey's government was once a bastion of secularism, enforcing measures that kept religion firmly out of public life. But Erdogan and the AKP have made a long series of moves to consolidate their power and give Islam more influence in government and society. Erdogan and his supporters say these policies are a reflection of the values and attitudes of Turkish society, and experts agree that Erdogan would be unlikely to push such a move if he did not think it would receive broad support.
“Erdogan has an Islamist flank that people sometimes forget about. He has to keep them happy,” Nicholas Danforth, a senior analyst at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, told The Washington Post. He pointed out that the AKP can be pragmatic on religious issues, citing the government's decision to raise alcohol taxes rather than ban alcohol outright. “The AKP is reportedly attentive to its own polling in anticipating how policy decisions will be received,” Danforth said.
But moves to roll back the judicial clock aren't merely about political expediency, said Soner Cagaptay, the director of the Turkish Research Program at the Washington Institute. “This is really Erdogan,” he said. “In his heart he believes adultery needs to be punished.”
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