The veil as an object of right-wing populist politics: a comparative perspective of Turkey, Sweden, and France

ABSTRACT

In this article, we comparatively analyse radical right-wing parties’ intervention into the veil debate in Turkey, Sweden, and France which are characterised by different understandings of legal and normative secularism. We explore the intersection of gender and religion in the dynamic formation of populist categories and how they can be mobilised differently along the vertical and the horizontal axes by the example of the veil. In all three countries we have analysed capitalise on gender, religiosity and secularity, and the veil is exploited in drawing boundaries between the People and non-People but also between the People and the Elites. In this way, the meanings attributed to the veil are used as a mechanism of exclusion and of drawing the boundaries through gendered narratives of who belongs to the People.

KEYWORDS:

• Populism
• gender
• religion
• secularism
• veil
• racism

Introduction

In this study, we comparatively analyse radical right-wing populism (RRP) intervention in the Muslim veil (i.e. headscarf) debate and its mobilisation of veil-related incidents to construct populist subject categories. We focus on RRP in France, Sweden and Turkey, which represent different national-institutional contexts and RRP trajectories. In our previous study on right-wing populism in France, Sweden and Turkey (Serdar, Öztürk and Giritli Nygren 2019), we argued that RRPs not only develop certain types of gender policies but that their construction of populist subject categories is itself a gendered process and intersects with religion and secularism.

We draw our understanding of populist subject categories from recent scholarly exchanges on populism’s anti-elitist vertical and exclusionary horizontal axes (Brubaker 2020; De Cleen and Stavrakakis 2017). RRP subject categories are formed not only by the vertical positioning of the People against the Elites – the People as underdogs – but also by the horizontal positioning of the People – the authentic people against non-People. On the vertical axis, the interests of the People are played against corrupt Elites, whereas on the horizontal axis, right-wing populists (RRPs) construct the People against perceived outsiders, called ‘non-People’, who might be minorities, immigrants, Muslims, LGBTQ, and feminists, among others. We followed this two-dimensional approach to RRP to better examine RRPs’ exclusionary tropes and the dynamic character of constructed subject categories. In both axes, the gendering of subject categories draws heavily from religious and/or secular references reassembled as civilisational frameworks in which the People is idealised and secured against both the Elites and non-People.

Gender and populism studies have primarily focused on right-wing populist parties’ views of gender, which are exemplified in their programmes and policies.in their programmes and policies (see, e.g. De Lange and Mügge 2015), in the relationships between different forms of populism and gender politics (Kantola and Lombardo 2019; Mudde and Kaltwasser 2015) or in how gender, sexuality and religion are interdependently articulated in populist discourse by using gender equality as an empty signifier and a rhetorical act (Saresma 2018). Other studies have focused on how traditional neoconservative heteronormative positions define right-wing populist parties’ gender-related agendas, regardless of the national contexts or gender politics of the countries in which the parties are operating (Norocel 2010).

A rich body of literature has been developed on the Islamic headscarf issue and its regulations (Gökarıksel 2009; Korteweg and Yurdakul 2014; Rosenberger and Sauer 2012; Sauer 2009; Scott 2007; Secor 2002; Skjeie 2007); however, there is scant research on how RRP movements intervene in this debate. Among the few studies examining RRPs’ use of veiling, Hadj-Abdou, Rosenberger, and Siim (2012) discussed the factors that explain the limits of RRPs’ programmes in some cases and their embrace of the veiling issue as symbolic of their broader anti-immigrant and nationalist agendas. Ajanovic, Mayer and Sauer (2018) addressed how the RRP movement in Austria presents Islamic veiling as an issue through which gender is juxtaposed against an ethicised other.

Departing from the two-dimensional approach, our study seeks to contribute to the studies exploring the intersection of populism with gender, religion and secularism by analysing RRPs’ intervention in the politics of veiling and its mobilisation, arguing that 1) RRPs’ approach to the veiling controversy is central in their construction of populist subject categories: people, Elites and non-People, 2) the binary construction of People against Elites through the deployment of veiling is more ambiguous because of diverging approaches among feminists around the veiling issue and 3) RRPs’ approach to the veiling debate disregards the agency of veiled women and seeks to monopolise the meaning or motivations of veiling/unveiling.

Framework and methodology

Our analysis combines secondary sources with a first-hand analysis of political statements by the RRP parties in each of the chosen countries: the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) in Turkey, the National Rally (Rassamblement National, NR) in France and the Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna, SDs) in Sweden.

The countries have different policies about veiling. Rosenberg and Sauer (2012), in their edited volume on the regulations of headscarves in Europe, noted the complexity of developing typologies about the regulations surrounding different types of religious attire; they also addressed the important roles played by the historically established relationship between religion, the state and normative traditions.

Alternatively, Skjeie (2007) identified three models of regulation: prohibitive, selective and non-restrictive tolerant. We chose cases from countries that represent these different models. France has an established restrictive ban approach that bans all religious symbols from public institutions. Turkey, categorised by Skjeje (2007) as a restrictive case, moved to a more selective regulation approach, lifting most restrictions after its 2013 regulations, yet maintaining a headscarf ban in primary schools and a face veil ban in all schools and public employment. Sweden is moving from being non-restrictive and tolerant towards a selective regulation approach. In 2019, two municipalities voted for a ban on headscarves in preschools and schools; with several municipalities, similar motions are underway. Over the years, private companies have implemented a so-called neutral clothing policy that facilitates the prohibition of visible religious, philosophical and political signs.

We are not interested in developing a typology of these three cases’ veiling regulations. Rather, we are interested in analysing how RRPs in different national contexts have similarities and differences in how they deal with the veiling issue to construct and mobilise ‘the People’ and antagonise non-People and their perceived Elite categories.

The methodological framework we employed relies on the principle that a case-oriented comparative approach to RRPs’ interventions in the veil debate in extremely different national, religious, secular, and cultural contexts will reveal valuable elements and allow us to understand how these structural connections and challenges are formed in relation to one another. Comparing the cases with those which previous research suggests share certain similarities (Ward 2010) would close the door to the largely unknown cases.

Our understanding draws on the selection of cases that are as different as possible. Turkey, a secular Muslim majority country, has undergone different veiling regulations that show how the veil is politicised by the religious-secular divide. France and Sweden are Christian countries with different framings of secularism, which illustrates specific readings of how the veil is used to create populist categories. The strength of this approach is that it helps us recontextualise the different strategies used in different comparative cases in populism studies.

A case study is a method that can ‘catch the complexity’ (Stake 1995) of a situation, and it can be intrinsic or instrumental. While instrumental case studies try to refine a theory or develop an insight into a specific issue (Baxter and Jack 2008), intrinsic case studies focus on a case because ‘it is of interest in its own right: in other words, the case is “intrinsically” interesting’ (Hellström, Nolan, and Lund 2005, 12).

The three countries we focus on were not undertaken because they develop an understanding of other cases but because, as Stake (1995) suggested, the case itself is of interest, and we as researchers with a genuine interest in the case will use this approach to provide insights that would help the future research.

After the collection of RRP politicians’ (political) statements from leading media outlets in Turkey, France and Sweden between 2010–2020, we analysed several aspects (e.g. the veil, religion, secularism and gender) embedded within the cases (Yin 2003). After a historical description of the cases, we thematically identified meaningful issues (Braun and Clarke 2006, 88), analysed them within the cases, looked for a common pattern in the cases and then applied a thematic analysis across the cases while looking for patterns. Interpreting the emerging unusual situation which is common in intrinsic cases is presented in the results.

The veil as an object of radical right-wing populism

Political and public discourse on gender equality and secularism is depicted with reference to the difference between women’s ‘uncovered’ and ‘covered’ bodies. Using the veil has long had important symbolic significance in both traditionally Christian and Islamic countries. Rosenberger and Sauer (see, e.g. Kiliç, Saharso and Sauer, 2008, 8) argued that the headscarf (and veiling in general) is ‘not only a piece of cloth but is the body of women – used as a signifier for cultural, religious and ethnic differences’. Scott (2007) emphasised that the divide between religion and secularism is entangled with an assemblage of norms related to gender, sexuality, class and the East/West divide.

In Western countries such as Sweden and France, and similarly in a pro-Western Muslim secular country such as Turkey, veiled women are consistently portrayed as submissive, conservative and victims of gendered oppression and unveiled women as secular, sexually emancipated and modern. Despite its multiple forms and meanings, veiling is ‘probably Islam’s most prominent icon’ (Gökarıksel 2009, 660), and its iconic and paradoxical position – once more invisible than overly visible (Göle 2017) – marks the Muslim female subject and her body in the public sphere as increasingly a mark of difference in a secular space imagined as being neutral.

The headscarf as a battleground (Turkey)

In Turkey, until the last decade, the Islamic headscarf was a highly polarising controversy, epitomising the country’s religious/secular divide. The republic’s founding elites considered the secularisation process identical to modernisation and Westernisation (Berkes 1998). Women’s public unveiling was considered a symbol of their emancipation and Turkey’s entry into the civilised world (Çınar 2008; Saktanber and Çorbacıoğlu 2008). Especially after the 1970s, due to mass rural-to-urban migration and the rise of Islamist politics, the public use of headscarves became a controversial and polarising topic. In the Turkish case, the headscarf ban at universities, first introduced in 1982, constituted the controversy’s focus. However, the ban was not implemented on most campuses until the 28 February 1997 military memorandum, signed by the National Security Council dominated by the military bureaucracy. After the memorandum which aimed at preventing the rise of ‘Islamist reactionism’, and resulted with the collapse of the coalition government led by between Islamist Welfare Party. Many headscarfed university students dropped out of university. ‘Convincing rooms’ were set up in some universities, where university staff talked with students to persuade them to take off their headscarves. Two incidents further contributed to the intensification of the headscarf controversy: 1) the prevention of the first headscarfed member of parliament, Merve Kavakçı, from taking her oath in the Turkish parliament in 1999; and 2) in 2007, the controversy about the presidential election of AKP candidate Abdullah Gül for being married to a headscarfed woman, Hayrunnisa Gül.

The secular opposition, especially the main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi-CHP), often appealed to the courts to preserve the ban on different occasions. AKP, which came to power in 2002, succeeded in gradually removing the ban from 2010 to 2014 from secondary and high schools, universities, parliament and public employment.¹

In the case of RRP in Turkey, the AKP in its early years in power merged its Islamist appeals with anti-elitist populism, in which, on the vertical axis, constructing People as oppressed Sunni Muslims by the secular/Westernised elites is firmly articulated with the narratives on the headscarf ban. Despite the ultimate removal of the ban by the AKP government, emotional wounds and memories around the headscarf ban have been reasserted, remembered and reconstructed in ways that the binary separation of the People is constantly reproduced. The headscarf ban has been remembered both randomly and in ceremonies, especially in those condemning the February 28 memorandum. Symbolising shared victimhood with the People, such performances are sometimes dramatised by public weeping in front of cameras, which helps to legitimise and mobilise the populist discourse of victimhood (Aslan 2021).

AKP leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the prime minister from 2003 to 2014 and the current president, recurrently calls the headscarf ban the expression of the secular elite’s oppression and humiliation of the People. Erdoğan transforms the issue into a personal story. The personification of the narrative through his two daughters enables the construction of this leader as an embodiment of the People. Because of the headscarf ban, Erdoğan’s daughters left Turkey and went to the USA for university study. Thus, Erdoğan often presents himself as a father who was a victim of secular oppression, sharing the emotions and pain of the People.

In 2016, Erdoğan delivered and speech and noted that he had ‘suffered’ as a father and could not make his children study in his own country. He invited the audience to question paradoxical oppression and celebrate the eventual victory:

Can you imagine that? You are a stranger in your own land, you are a pariah in your own homeland, and you cannot make them study in your own country?! (The crowd applauded) And, many state presidents were surprised at me. They asked me, ‘Aren’t you Muslims’? ‘Yes, I am’. Then, ‘how come they cannot study in their own country?’ I said, ‘for this and for that’. But now, God be praised, now. Is there such a problem? No; there is not. (The crowd applauded)

While the AKP has gradually consolidated its power and shifted towards authoritarian populism, its self-narrative as the representatives of oppressed people has been challenged by its own elite status. As a result of this, the AKP’s discourse has increasingly pushed the previous Elites to a non-People category. The headscarf controversy is a central player in this shift, which was crystallised in the alleged ‘Kabataş incident’. In 2013, during the Gezi Park protests against the government, a headscarfed woman claimed that a large group of protestors, who were described as wild, brutal and vindictive, verbally and physically attacked her. It was claimed that they insulted her headscarf and Erdoğan while she was with her baby in a busy transit area called ‘Kabataş’ in central Istanbul. The pro-government media and AKP elites, including Erdoğan, have consistently framed the incident as an attack against the headscarf itself. However, the eventual criminal investigation and the CCTV footage broadcast months later showed no evidence. Nevertheless, the insistence on the authenticity of the incident aimed at reshuffling the victimhood of Muslim women, but this time not on the vertical axis but in a binary opposition on the horizontal axis.

In the case of Turkey, Kemalist feminist groups, in particular, supported the headscarf ban in the name of protecting secularism and often identified Islamic veiling with patriarchal domination. Although some other feminist and secular groups opposed the ban, the AKP discourse tends to perceive and represent feminists as one uniform group oblivious to the suffering of headscarved women and refuses to appreciate the inequalities among covered and uncovered women resulting from the ban. On the other hand, Erdoğan has repeatedly declared that he does not believe in man-woman equality but rather the divinely created differences of each sex; he contrasts the authentic women of the People who embrace motherhood against feminists who refuse to be an authentic woman. In this frame, feminists are imagined as one uniform group alienated from religious, moral and traditional values of the People, which are heteronormative and familialist. Therefore, like seculars, feminists are pushed towards the non-People category.

The AKP’s discourse tends to disregard the agency of headscarved women who do not comply with AKP policies and because of their defiance, they are removed from the status of authenticity. A recent mediatised dispute exemplifies how women’s agency can be disregarded. In 2020, for the first time, a headscarfed woman, Sevgi Kılıç, was elected to the CHP’s central party assembly; this reflects a gradual shift taking place in the CHP leadership’s view on the headscarf. Erdoğan called the first high-profile headscarfed CHP member a ‘window mannequin’. Because she transgresses the divide between ‘authentic’ and ‘unauthentic’, the young woman politician in question was symbolically ostracised and depicted as a passive object of display. AKP elites assert that ‘the CHP mindset’ is incapable of a sincere change; thus, those acts are not convincing.

In a follow-up speech on the issue, Erdoğan challenged the CHP leader in the following way:

Give up your trying to deceive the nation by taking two headscarfed women by your side. You cannot trick the nation. Those days are gone. Even if you’d put not two but twenty headscarved (women) at your side, they (the nation) know who you are.

The AKP’s discourse seeks to monopolise and fixate headscarfed women’s way of life or political choices, yet it is confronted with the agency and complexity of headscarfed women. Paradoxically, the AKP’s such efforts are also challenged by the fact that for political parties and public opinion, the headscarf controversy has been losing its polarising force. Recent surveys indicate that the gap between different party voters concerning the removal of the headscarf ban in public employment has been narrowed down (Metropoll Araştırma 2021). On the other hand, in recent years, several pro-government figures have expressed their concerns about increase of secularisation and the ‘unveiling’ trend among the children of pious families.

In 2019, many young women, while telling their personal stories about unveiling, shared photos on social media (along with a #10yearschallenge hashtag) that revealed their previously covered and now uncovered selves (Bianet 2019). In doing so, they asserted their agency and challenged any attempt to monopolise women’s meanings/motivations for veiling/unveiling. Emerging forms of fluidity and transitivity challenge binary exclusionism and the desired uniformity of subject categories in populist discourse.

The veil as an all-purpose discourse in France

‘In France, we don’t wear the headscarf. In France, it’s Brigitte Bardot in a swimsuit rather than women in niqabs’ (Marine Le Pen).

‘The veil is a weapon used by political Islam to go against everything we believe in: secularism, freedom, equality between women and men’ (MLP).

‘The migration diktat of the EU, which manifests itself in the Czech Republic by new waves of immigrants to which the submissive and corrupt elites who govern your country turn a blind eye’ (MLP).

‘In some neighbourhoods, it’s not good to be a woman, gay, Jewish, not even French or white’ (MLP).

In the case of RRP in France, on the vertical axis, the discursive construction of ‘People’ as ‘submissive, victims of circumstances and frustrated’ by the political elites is articulated by narratives promising the ‘Islamic veil’ ban to protect alleged equality between women and men, secularism, and freedom of the ‘French People’ from political Islam. On the horizontal axis, it is constructed not only by the estrangement of ‘Islamic Others’ in relation to the people of Judeo-Christian heritage and homosexuals but also by pitting secular, modern French women against veiled women living in ‘banlieues’.

The long history of French colonialism, with major events that drew international attention to Islam, has played an essential role in the presence and permanence of RRP in contemporary French politics. RRPs’ approach to the veil issue is not independent of their ideology based on ethnic and racially motivated nativism combined with welfare chauvinism and Euroscepticism (Mudde 2007). The portrayal of immigration by the National Front during Jean-Marie Le Pen’s presidency to differentiate ‘who is and who is not “native”’ (ibid: 64) contributed not only to constructing French Muslims as constant non-natives but also to the veil as something that belongs to and is identified with non-natives.

In France, controversies based on religion in educational institutions are not new, and they have been important components of the struggle between the church and the republicans since the nineteenth century. A law in 1905 known as the ‘Separation Act’ remains the base of all relations between religions and the state and has been the principal piece of legislation outlining French laicisation (Bauberot 2010). In historically and traditionally Christian France, secularism as a political discourse (Scott 2018) embodied with Western and Christian legacy institutionalised the belief that ‘religion is the Orient’ (Anidjar 2006 in Scott 2018, 20); hence, religion in political discourse replaced the Orient’s major religion: Islam. Although Islam’s encounter with the West is old, France’s first interaction with the veil happened during the 1950s when de-veiling ceremonies in Algeria were staged (Clancy-Smith 1998 in Barat and Sungun 2012). Women’s emancipation, according to colonial forces, could be achieved by embracing European values.

After the Colonial Era, the first known ‘veil affair’ dates to 1989 (‘l’affaire du voile de Creil’), when three students were expelled from a school in Creil, in northern France. Although the incident was not ruled out by the court as incompatible with the principles of the laïcité in 1989, the problem with the insistence of National Front (Scott 2007) did not cool down. Between 1989 and 2004, three major veil controversies in public schools generated tension in public opinion. In 2004, just two years after the presidential election, when Jean-Marie Le Pen was defeated by Chirac, the first law prohibiting the wearing of ‘conspicuous signs’ in public schools (with emphasis on laïcité) was adapted. According to Scott (2018), who reviewed France’s highest court (Conseil d’État) rulings on the application of the law from 1905 to 1987, the court had no concerns related to veil, which could allegedly destroy gender equality. While the Court framed the decision regarding the expulsion of the three girls in 1989 as a problem of public order in schools after the veil ban in 2004, the first time since 1905, gender equality as a symbol of secularism against Islam has been mentioned in the law.

The above-mentioned legislation has opened the door for further restrictions in private places An example was in 2014 in the incident known as ‘Baby-Loup’, which would end with the dismissal of a ‘private nursery’ employee for not removing her veil in the workplace and the decision would be confirmed by the highest court. In October 2019, 15 years after the first veil controversy in a public school, a veiled woman accompanying her children on a school trip to the regional council headquarters was verbally attacked by radical right politician Julien Odoul, who accused her of making a ‘communitarian provocation’.² Marine Le Pen, during the same week, said: ‘ … Islamic communitarian cancer, which began with the density of immigration … to change our society, change our habits and customs, change the way we dress, eat, have fun […] (MLP 2020).

These veil controversies led to political cleavages among feminists confronted with this challenge. Except for a group that contested the law and organised it as ‘Une Ecole pour Tous et Toutes (School for all, Boys and Girls)’, the majority of feminists, including policymakers and women’s organisations, never saw the veil as a ‘reasonable choice’ (Scott 2007, 134) and advocated the veil’s contradiction with the republican values of laïcité and gender equality. Through republican universalist claims that fail to account for difference and equality, French political elites (left-wing and right-wing), with ‘state feminists’ and academics, took a stance against what they deemed oppressive. As a consequence, they overlooked veiled women’s agency and the reasons that veiled women give to their veiling. De-veiling politics, this time by legislative rather than colonial power, was accomplished by a large coalition in defiance of the agency of veil-wearing women.

With veil-related controversies, RRP discourses on gender equality against Islam became highly productive in the formation of People on the horizontal axis. FN’s radical populist strategy initially embodied anti-immigrant racial politics: accompanied by anti-Islam racism, it contributed to National Front’s emergence in national politics. Formerly deeply related with Catholic traditionalism and integralism, RRP, with the ‘secular turn’ (Almeida 2013) of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (NR) and a discursive shift from racial superiority arguments to ‘incompatibility’ among cultures, capitalised on laïcité as a means to reframe anti-Muslim resentments into a more acceptable discourse (Dézé 2012; Shields 2014). In contrast to Jean-Marie Le Pen, who assumed himself to be the voice of the ‘little people’, Marine Le Pen, educated in elite schools, a lawyer and a single mother, has not opposed the republican elites (Göle 2011) and their values; on the contrary, she has enunciated herself as a defender of secularism, equality between the sexes, and LGBTQ and Jewish people against the ‘Muslim invasion’ (Roy 2016).

Like Erdoğan, MLP has also transformed the veil issue into a personal story and enabled the construction of the leader as the embodiment of the People. During her diplomatic visit to Lebanon before the elections in 2017, Le Pen was scheduled to meet the mufti of the Republic. When she was given a veil before the meeting, she refused to wear it and stated:

“I indicated on Monday that I will not veil myself. They did not cancel the appointment, so I thought they would agree that I did not wear the veil … They tried to impose that on me, to put me in front of a fait accompli, well they could not put me in front of a fait accompli.”

The veil served her as a productive ground to mobilise People against not only France’s religious, cultural and ethnic ‘incompatibles’ but also an ‘imagined group’ of republicans who allegedly supported the veil and veiled women.

Mobilising the veil as caring racism and anti(elite) feminism (Sweden)

In the case of RRP in Sweden, the conflict between the People and Elites along the vertical axis is not only antagonistic; it also represents a moral dichotomy. SDs, with its roots in neo-Nazi organisations, was founded in 1988 and has during the subsequent years gradually reshaped its racist and extremist formulations while moving the party from the fringe into mainstream politics (Hellström, Nolan, and Lund 2016). In the national election of 2010, SDs, for the first time, won seats in the parliament. Since the 2014 election, it has held a position among Sweden’s three largest parties together with the social democrats and the conservatives [moderaterna].

The party’s mainstream politics include a populist shift in constructing the People, from the rhetoric of racial purity towards rhetoric based on culture and values. In this shift, both religion and gender (i.e. equality) have played an important role, and the veil has become a significant object that ties them together and draws boundaries against both elites and non-People. The discourses about veiling promoted by the SDs have turned the veil into a signifier not only of the social meaning of gender and equality but also as a signifier of multiculturalism and the religious other. Christianity in its secularised forms, not as a belief system but as a historical and cultural tradition, has replaced former appeals to safeguard racial purity, albeit arguably in a ‘racializing manner that often recreates the content of biological racism through different words’ (Mulinari and Neergaard 2014, 45). The People are identified by certain moral values, where God, according to Åkesson, ‘is a set of norms and values’ (Åkesseon, interviewed in Dagen 2014).

In 2004, the SDs tried to ban full-face veils by orchestrating media campaigns and making various motions in the city council in the name of immigrant women’s rights³ (Doubakil 2018). It is not that these discussions did not exist before 2000, but it is possible to see an intensification of the debate and how veiling became an increasingly important object in the SDs’ construction of populist categories. Within their 2010 campaign, the year they made their parliamentary breakthrough, they used a much-discussed movie for their election campaign in which fragile elderly (Swedish) women were pitted against a group of veiled women with prams (i.e. signifying the threat of Muslim immigrants). The movie was arranged as a race towards two different brake levers and the pensioner (i.e. retiree) and the Muslim women compete to try to first get to the brakes to either pull the immigration brake or the pension brake. The immigrant break represents the SDs’ desire to stop Sweden’s ‘Islamisation’. This perspective becomes clearer when the covered women almost chase the lone, weak pensioner to the sound of what can be likened to an alarm or warning signal. The overall significance of this film is that a vote for the SDs is a vote for the (ethnically Swedish) pensioners who have built Sweden.

The SDs stated on their webpage their official position on the veil: they favour the complete ban of burka and niqab use because such veiling practices do not belong in an open and equal society. These statements have also often been articulated in Åkesson’s speeches, as exemplified below:

The veil, burqa and niqab are not just religious symbols. They are also symbolling the oppression of women, of values that do not belong in our country. (Åkesson speech at Järva Week, 2018)

In a previous analysis of how SDs articulation of Christianity is integral to Swedish culture, Haugen (2015) showed how Åkesson described the Swedish Church as becoming less Swedish and less Christian as a sign of how the trinity of feminism, cultural Marxism and multiculturalism have increasingly replaced the Holy Trinity.

Linking feminism, cultural Marxism and multiculturalism in this way is a populist mobilisation where a multiculturalist society is articulated as a threat to the Christian cultural identity of the Swedish people, and an oppositional relationship between the people and the feminists, cultural Marxists and multiculturalists is created. In Sweden, RRPs have successfully mobilised a particularly agonistic relationship between Christian heritage, equality and a binary understanding of gender and cultural Marxism, multiculturalists and feminists. In one of his speeches in 2019, Åkesson said that ‘The Social Democrats, and thereby Sweden’s “feminist government”, are crawling for Communists and Islamists’ (Åkessons summer speech Sölvesborg 2019). Along with the vertical axis, pitting people against elites, the veil becomes an object of SDs’ populist politics that plays into gender populism, defending ‘us, the People’ against the academic feminist elite.

Although perhaps the SDs follow similar patterns to how anti-Muslim racism is articulated in France, for example, we suggest, following Sager and Mulinari (2018), that the focus on gender in constructing the people is specific to Sweden’s history of being a women-friendly welfare state (see, e.g. Giritli Nygren, Martinsson, and Mulinari 2018). The notion of gender equality, as is typical for Sweden and Swedish identity, has elevated gender equality as a highly normative force. It functions as a national trait that naturalises heterosexuality by focusing on and naturalising relations between women and men but also to normalise an imagined modern, highly developed ‘we’ and an ‘other’ that lacks those attributes (Martinsson, Griffin, and Giritli Nygren 2016).

Gender equality as a core value of Swedish society is more often than not instrumentally employed to distinguish between the gender-equal native ethnic majority and the supposedly deeply patriarchal migrant other (Mulinari and Neergaard 2014; Norocel 2017). The secular ‘gender equality’ regime is characterised by secular institutions with well-established gender policies and women´s rights. The vertical battle for hegemony in society centres around the agonistic relationship between cultural Christian heritage, family-friendly politics and equality based on a binary understanding of gender. Nowadays, these aspects are devalued and threatened by the socially democratic party in power, which has given space for feminist elites, multiculturalists and Marxists to deconstruct Swedish people’s fundament.

Åkesson and his party colleagues often criticise the Swedish establishment for turning a blind eye to the plight of ‘other’ women. The arguments in this discursive mode reflect a viewpoint that Mulinari and Neergaard (2014) call ‘caring racism’. Oppressed veiled women must be saved, whereas the Muslim political subject is a person from whom we (or the people) need to be saved. Mirza (2013) discussed this as the dual role of veiled Muslim women, who are simultaneously portrayed as voiceless victims in need of saving and as a potential threat. The articulation of gender and equality is here a performative rhetorical act, and there is a difference between the framing of the oppressed veiled women on the one hand and the framing of the Muslim political subject on the other (Jakku 2018).

The formation of RRPs gendered subjectivity

In this study, the RRP mobilisations we have analysed capitalise on gender, religiosity, and secularity. The veil is exploited in drawing boundaries between the People and non-People but also between the People and the Elites. In this way, the meanings attributed to the veil are a mechanism of exclusion and of drawing boundaries through gendered narratives about who belongs to the People.

In our analysis, we discovered that RRPs are unwilling to solve their constitutive antagonism, which is the veiling controversy in this particular case. With Turkey, the AKP is paradoxically challenged by its own contribution to solving the headscarf problem. After a decade in power, restrictive regulations have been changed. This moderation has been accepted by a large segment of society. The main secular opposition party at the leadership level has abandoned its pro-ban position. All these trends challenged the AKP’s claim to be an exclusive representative of oppressed headscarfed women and that secular opposition is incapable of changing its anti-headscarf stance. The AKP still attempts to impede the growing transitivity between the ‘veiling regimes’ (Secor 2002), which are used to segregate the public sphere more solidly (cf, Gökarıksel 2009).

With the NR, immigration and the veil as constitutive antagonism still serve as productive grounds to construct subject categories. The NR sets the tone in debates about immigration through which exclusionary populist politics can be conveyed to demarcate the boundaries of mentioned categories. The discursive construction of an imagined enemy, friendly towards the veil and hence towards immigrants, despite widespread consensus regarding existing restrictive regulations and demands for further restrictive measures, sustains the deepening of boundaries between the People, Elites, and non-People.

The RRP discourses adopted in several controversial incidents we examined in the case analyses construct the People not only by using their repertoires of binary understandings but also by addressing each society’s broader secular and religious normative codes. For RRP mobilisations, gender and sexuality imbued with religious and secular norms provide prolific grounds for assigning people to specific populist subject categories and serve as constitutive battlegrounds for hegemony.

In this study, we examined the intersection of the headscarf controversy with religion, secularism and gender in RRP politics on both the vertical and horizontal construction of populist subject categories. We demonstrated that the veiling controversy serves as a constitutive antagonism for RRP by which the categories of People, elites and non-People are constructed. We argue that the binary construction of these categories remains more ambiguous about feminists because, in each case, feminists’ stance on the controversy is far from uniform; however, RRPs tend to represent feminists as one, preferably hostile category. We also suggest that RRPs are inclined to disregard the agency of veiled women and monopolise and sometimes silence their diverse and complex voices.

In each case, RRPs articulate their views on headscarves with their distinct populist ideologies and national contexts. In Turkey, the headscarf issue conveys the backbone of the secular-religious divide around which the question of authenticity is answered, and it facilitates the construction of a new national hegemonic project called ‘The New Turkey’ by AKP elites. In France, where ‘laïc’ republican and RRP discourses are intertwined at the point of legitimating exclusion, the dichotomous framing of the veil facilitates NR’s stabilisation of its exclusionary populist politics and mobilisation of People against veiled French Muslims and ‘veil-friendly imagined enemy’. In Sweden, RRP discourses have mobilised a particularly agonistic relationship between the People and multiculturalists and feminists along the vertical axis and by Muslims and immigrants on the horizontal axis. In these mobilisations, Christian heritage, the religious-secular divide and gender equality play important roles.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Until 2013, headscarves were permitted only in girls’ imam-hatip (cleric-preacher) secondary and high schools.

2. Communitarianism in the French context is being interpreted as minority groups aiming to create distinct ethnic political communities against republican values and norms.

3. Until 2019, motions suggesting a veil ban for children in preschool and primary school never received enough support. However, in 2019, the banning of headscarves in preschools and schools was voted through in two Swedish municipalities. In both municipalities, the SDs played an important role.