Haktan Ural draws on social media posts from Türkiye's anti-alimony campaigns to show how a currency crash and years of economic insecurity has fuelled rage against gender equality. When progressive politics failed to answer economic pain, anti-gender movements stepped in
Türkiye's social media anti-alimony campaigns began in 2018, the year in which Türkiye's economic instability took hold. The campaigns coincided with the ruling AKP party's broader illiberal turn. The country's currency crisis only deepened during the pandemic years that followed. Soaring prices and unemployment created economic hardship for many, and male unemployment rose from 9.5% in 2018 to 12.7% in 2019. But according to anti-alimony campaigns' X accounts, this hardship was not the result of flawed economic policy.
According to anti-alimony campaigns' X accounts, soaring prices and unemployment in Türkiye is the result of gender equality policy, not flawed economic policy
Two accounts, @trbiaplatformu and @snmplatformu, track an effective playbook that claim economic suffering is the result of gender equality policy, echoing a broader pattern of social movements’ tactical use of social media platforms. Their specific target is 'indefinite alimony', a decades-old rule designed mainly to protect low-income ex-wives that lets Turkish courts order lifetime support after divorce.
In 1988, Türkiye passed a law making it possible to order one party to pay the other indefinite alimony if that party falls into poverty after divorce. The law does not define women as the alimony recipient. But in a country where women's employment remains limited and which largely preserves the 'male breadwinner' role, the typical alimony recipient is female.
A 2020 report found that half of approved alimony payments are made irregularly or not at all. The system these campaigns portray as crushing men is, for most women who rely on it, barely functioning
There are also serious questions over how effective indefinite alimony is at preventing divorcees' impoverishment. A 2020 KONDA report found that 45% of people requesting alimony in Türkiye have no income whatsoever. It also found that half of approved payments are made irregularly or not at all. The system these campaigns portray as crushing men is, for most women who rely on it, barely functioning.
Yet campaigners tell a different story, catastrophising indefinite alimony as 'tyranny', 'genocide', and 'lifetime debt'. Posts recurrently cite men who, after a single day of marriage, are left owing alimony for life. Nor do campaigners frame these as isolated stories, but as proof that gender equality policy itself has failed men.
The campaigns build their case around two linked images. First is the 'family under threat'. Hashtags like #FamilyInAlarm and #ProtectingTheFamilyIsProtectingTheHomeland blame alimony for driving down marriage and birthrates. Campaigners claim it pushes couples toward unmarried cohabitation, and tears households apart.
The second image is the emotionally charged 'victimised man', which borrows the vocabulary of equality and justice that feminist activism spent decades building. In this framing, males are the victims, while females either disappear from the narrative or resurface as calculating ex-wives. Campaign posts recast alimony recipients as opportunists gaming the system; for instance, staying unmarried on paper to keep collecting payments. The man is a victim of circumstance, the woman an agent of greed.
Anti-alimony campaigners are recasting the gender equality policy debate as a moral one in which feminists and women's organisations are the villains
Through these images, campaigners recast a policy debate as a moral one in which feminists and women's organisations are the villains. One post calls Western-funded women's groups 'a national security issue', and point to Russia's crackdown on similar organisations as a model worth following.
This pattern is not unique to Türkiye. Illiberal movements elsewhere channel the same economic anxiety into gender politics by mobilising an image of aggrieved masculine strength. The economic fragility, insecurity, and eroded safety nets that neoliberalism produces rarely result in better policy. Instead, they distort ideology, transforming the lived impact of economic crisis into rage towards women, feminists, and gender equality. This is why Agnieszka Graff and Elżbieta Korolczuk describe anti-gender mobilisation as a symptom of neoliberalism, not a challenge to it.
This is the dilemma now facing progressive movements. If they cannot respond when economic policy fails people, illiberal actors will mobilise to fill the gap.
This blog post was created in the scope of short-term scientific mission at the University of Stavanger, supported by CA23149 Democratization at stake? Comparing Anti-Gender Politics in CEE and NME countries (Anti-Gender Politics)
No.49 in a thread on the 'illiberal wave' 🌊 sweeping world politics
