The concern of LGBT+ communities in Türkiye and Poland

In Turkey, two weeks after the re-election of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the LGBT+ community is worried. Homosexuality is not repressed there. The situation of sexual minorities, however, is increasingly precarious. These fears are all the more well-founded since homophobia was one of the main themes of President Erdogan’s last campaign. It was above all a smear campaign against his main rival, Kemal Kiliçdaroglu. And one of the axes of this campaign was to present him as the LGBT + candidate, systematically qualified as “pervert”, which he compared to “the plague”, “a poison for the family”. Hate speech peaked during this campaign. The tone and the repression went crescendo these last ten years. After bringing together increasingly large crowds, up to tens of thousands of people, Istanbul Gay Pride has been banned since 2015. It is systematically repressed by the police. This is also the case for the one scheduled for Sunday, June 18.

In Europe, Poland is considered the most hostile country to the LGBT+ community. But rainbow flags should still be flying in the streets of Warsaw. Every year, the Equality March is very successful in the Polish capital. The mayor of Warsaw will lead the march on Saturday June 17 and he is expected to be followed by thousands of people, including Ukrainians who have fled the war and who have decided to join in the Polish festivities. This is the only time of the year that the LGBT+ community can really express their pride in public in Poland. Assuming one’s gender or sexual orientation is not always easy. Already because the Church is very hostile to the community. And she still has a lot of weight in Poland. And on the political scene, with the arrival of the Law and Justice party in power in 2015, the situation has worsened. He leads a great crusade against what he calls “LGBT+ ideology” and chains laws to curtail the rights of gender and sexual minorities.