The midnight knock was coming
The police came for them this week. In a series of coordinated raids across Turkey’s major cities, authorities have detained at least 63 people. Officers targeted the private homes of LGBTQ+ activists and the city’s few remaining gay bars. The official reason given for the mass arrests is a new state campaign to protect 'family values'. This is not a new justification. Human rights organisations inside Turkey immediately denounced the action, describing the campaign as a transparent and cynical pretext for state sponsored persecution. The scale of the operation suggests a high level of central planning. This was not the decision of a single provincial police chief.
But the raids were not a bolt from the blue. For those who have been watching the government’s rhetoric, the midnight knock was always coming. The groundwork for this nationwide crackdown has been meticulously laid for years, constructed piece by piece through the escalating hostility of senior ministers and the president himself. This week’s arrests are the sharp, physical culmination of a sustained political project, one that has methodically and publicly painted gay, lesbian and transgender people as a corrosive threat to the Turkish nation. It was a long preparation. The state was creating an enemy.
The process was gradual and deliberate. It did not begin with police breaking down doors. It began with words. Speeches from officials have, over the last decade, consistently framed sexual minorities as carriers of a foreign ideology, a dangerous concept incompatible with Turkey’s authentic culture and beliefs. This official language then gave a green light to state regulators and sympathetic media outlets, which amplified the message and normalised the idea that the LGBTQ+ community was a legitimate target for state action. Words became warrants. This slow campaign of dehumanisation created the necessary political space for the police to move from simply banning Pride parades to conducting coordinated raids on private residences. The detention of 63 individuals is therefore less a new policy than the predictable result of a strategy that identified a target long ago. The signal was sent years ago. This week, it was finally delivered.
Erdoğan needs a domestic enemy
Politics is calculation. This is a cold calculation. For President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party, the raids are not a matter of morality. They are a matter of political survival. The Turkish economy is in deep trouble. Stubbornly high inflation continues to corrode the purchasing power of millions of ordinary families, the very people who once formed the bedrock of the AKP’s electoral success. When a government cannot deliver prosperity, it must offer something else. It needs a different conversation. Erdoğan is changing the subject.
The utility is brutal and simple. The crackdown offers a potent distraction from failures of economic policy. It also works to consolidate a fragile political coalition. Erdoğan’s power depends on holding together an alliance of conservatives, religious voters and nationalists, a bloc that has shown signs of fracturing under the weight of economic hardship. A campaign against the LGBTQ+ community is a powerful glue. It allows the president to rally his base around a shared cultural grievance, portraying himself as the guardian of the nation’s faith, family and traditions against a tide of supposed Western degeneracy. He cannot fix the price of food. He can promise to protect the 'traditional family'. This is that promise in action.
This is a familiar strategy. Create an enemy. The chosen group must be easily identifiable and possess limited political power. The LGBTQ+ community fits the requirement. By framing gay and transgender people as a foreign import, a plot to weaken Turkey from within, the government constructs a simple narrative for complex times. The nation is not suffering because of economic mismanagement. It is under attack. These arrests are presented not as oppression, but as national self defence. It is a playbook Erdoğan has deployed before against other groups, from academics to journalists, recasting domestic dissent as a form of foreign aggression. He needs a domestic enemy. The raids show he has chosen one.
It was not always like this
It was not always like this. The current repression is a choice, not an inevitability. It is a recent invention. A decade ago, the atmosphere in Istanbul was radically different, a fact that makes the present crackdown feel like a deliberate reversal of the country’s own recent history. The city’s annual Pride march was once a major event. It was the largest celebration of its kind in the Muslim world. In 2013 and 2014, tens of thousands of people marched down İstiklal Avenue, the central artery of modern Istanbul. They carried rainbow flags and danced in the streets. They were not hiding. The crowds were a vibrant mix of LGBTQ+ Turks, their families, secular allies and curious tourists, all participating in a public festival of visibility and hope. The police presence was minimal, often bordering on relaxed. That Turkey now seems like a distant memory. It has been erased.
The shift was not sudden. It was a slow, calculated suffocation. After 2014, the authorities began to impose restrictions. The first outright ban on the Istanbul march came in 2015, citing vague security concerns. Each year since, the official excuses have shifted but the outcome has remained the same, a cordon of riot police where a parade used to be. The relative tolerance of the previous era was never a firm ideological commitment from the Justice and Development Party. It was a pragmatic posture, adopted when the government was still actively pursuing European Union membership and presenting a more liberal face to the West. That project is now dormant. The political winds have changed. Erdoğan’s government no longer sees value in appearing open or tolerant. It sees value in appearing strong to a conservative base.
This historical context is crucial. It shows that the current hostility is not some deep rooted, unchangeable feature of Turkish culture. It is a political tool. The state that once policed a peaceful parade of tens of thousands now organises midnight raids to arrest dozens. This demonstrates a conscious pivot. The very existence of those earlier, joyful marches proves that a different path was possible, one where Turkish society could accommodate its LGBTQ+ citizens openly. The government chose to close that path. The raids are not an expression of public will. They are an imposition of state power, designed to crush a community that was, only a few years ago, celebrating its existence in the heart of the nation’s biggest city. That world is gone.
The state has its machinery
The rhetoric is backed by the full force of the state. This is not just talk. A whole institutional apparatus has been mobilised to constrict the lives of LGBTQ+ people in Turkey. It has many arms.
The legal basis for much of the crackdown is intentionally vague. The police and judiciary rely on broad articles in the Turkish penal code, clauses concerning public morality and exhibitionism that can be interpreted to mean almost anything the authorities wish. A person holding a rainbow flag at a student protest can be accused of offending public decency. This legal ambiguity is a weapon. It allows for selective and arbitrary enforcement, creating a constant state of uncertainty and fear. The law is a tool.
Then there is the media regulator. The Radio and television Supreme Council, known as RTÜK, has evolved into the state’s primary cultural censor, systematically fining broadcasters and demanding the removal of any content deemed to conflict with the government’s vision of national and spiritual values. Television shows featuring gay characters have been cancelled or forced to rewrite scripts. A rainbow flag in the background of a children's cartoon can trigger a punitive fine. The aim is total erasure from the public sphere. RTÜK ensures that for many Turks, especially outside the big cities, LGBTQ+ people simply cease to exist on screen. They vanish.
Providing the moral justification for this erasure is the Diyanet, the Directorate of Religious Affairs. This is a hugely powerful and well funded government body. It controls over 80,000 mosques. Sermons delivered in thousands of mosques across the country, all written and approved by the Diyanet’s central office in Ankara, frequently condemn homosexuality as a perversion, a sin, and a source of social decay. These pronouncements, broadcast from the minbar every Friday, give a religious blessing to the police’s actions. They tell a story of moral purity. They frame the state's crackdown not as a political choice but as a sacred duty to protect the family and the nation.
These institutions do not act independently. They form a coordinated system. The Diyanet provides the religious argument. RTÜK enforces the media silence. The police, armed with ambiguous laws, make the arrests. It is a machine designed for suppression, methodically dismantling a community’s ability to live, speak, and be seen.
Europe is watching. And waiting.
The statements came quickly. They were predictable. In Brussels, the European Union’s foreign policy arm issued a formal notice of its ‘deep concern’ regarding the raids, a carefully worded piece of text reminding Ankara of its obligations as a member of the Council of Europe. It changes nothing. These condemnations from Western capitals are now a familiar part of the diplomatic ritual that follows every domestic crackdown in Turkey. They are heard as noise. In Ankara, they are discounted before they are even released, dismissed as the cost of doing business for a government pursuing its own agenda.
This diplomatic impotence has deep roots. Turkey’s decades long campaign to join the European Union is, in practice, over. Accession talks are frozen. The relationship is no longer about a hopeful convergence of values but a hard headed transaction based on mutual need, a negotiation where President Erdoğan holds powerful cards. The EU pays Turkey billions of pounds to prevent millions of refugees, mostly from Syria, from reaching European shores. This 2016 agreement gives the Turkish president immense leverage, a permanent threat he can deploy whenever criticism from Brussels becomes too loud. He understands that for governments in Berlin, Rome, and Paris, the prospect of another migrant crisis is a far more terrifying political problem than the arrest of sixty three people in Istanbul.
Then there is NATO. Turkey is not just a member. It is a strategically vital one. It has the second largest army in the alliance. It controls the Bosphorus strait, the only maritime passage to the Black Sea, a chokepoint of immense importance. Turkey is a geopolitical hinge. Its geography makes it indispensable for projecting power and gathering intelligence across the Middle East, the Caucasus, and the Black Sea basin. Washington needs the use of İncirlik Air Base. The alliance needs Turkish cooperation to manage regional conflicts. Erdoğan knows this. He is making a calculated bet that Turkey’s security contributions will shield him from any meaningful consequences.
He believes the West needs him more than he needs its approval on human rights. A public rebuke from a foreign ministry spokesperson is a negligible price to pay for securing his conservative base and persecuting a community he has designated as a threat to the nation. He is wagering that strategic necessity will always trump idealistic pronouncements. The actions of Western leaders suggest his calculation is correct. So Europe condemns. And it waits. The Turkish government knows that waiting is probably all it will do.
Rainbows through the cracks
The grand parades are gone. The state has made sure of that. The annual Istanbul Pride march, which a decade ago drew tens of thousands onto İstiklal Avenue in a vast, joyous celebration of freedom, is now just a memory, suppressed by barricades and police force. A mass movement cannot survive in public when the state is determined to crush it. It is a victory for the government. A temporary one. Repression forces adaptation. The movement did not die. It simply changed its form.
Activists are learning to fight a different kind of war. It is a war of attrition. They scatter. They go underground. Instead of one large, predictable demonstration which is easy for the authorities to kettle and break up, there are now dozens of smaller, spontaneous actions. A group reading poetry in a park. A 'picnic' where rainbow flags are unfurled for a few minutes before disappearing. A film screening in a private flat. These events are harder to police, coordinated on encrypted apps just hours in advance, designed to create fleeting moments of visibility and solidarity before the security services can react. The goal is no longer to occupy a central square for a day but to exist everywhere, all the time, a constant, low level assertion that they have not been defeated.
The fight also moves online. This is crucial. The state's media apparatus, controlled by the communications regulator RTÜK and loyal business groups, pumps out a constant stream of homophobic propaganda, portraying LGBTQ+ people as sick, foreign agents, and a threat to the Turkish family. The internet is the one space they do not fully control. Activists use social media platforms to bypass the official narrative, sharing personal stories, organising legal aid for the arrested, and meticulously documenting abuses by police officers. They create their own media. They build their own communities. This digital organising provides a vital lifeline, especially for young people in conservative towns who might otherwise feel completely alone.
This is a long game. The objective has shifted from seeking rights to ensuring survival. It is about endurance. Activists know that President Erdoğan will not be in power forever, and their strategy is to keep the community’s infrastructure, networks, and spirit intact until the political climate changes. The state wants them to vanish. It wants them to become invisible and afraid, to retreat from public life entirely. Every small, defiant act of protest, online or off, is a refusal to disappear. This is what resilience looks like. It is quiet. It is determined. It is the hope of rainbows seen through the cracks in a wall.
Sources. BBC News World: Turkish police detain dozens in raids on gay bars and homes of LGBTQ+ activists. Al Jazeera: Turkish authorities launch anti-LGBTQ raids, detaining dozens.
Analysis. Drafted with AI assistance from the sources listed above and reviewed by an editor before publication. Jnews links to the organisations it writes about.
