Authoritarian Regimes Target LGBTQ+ Communities as Political Scapegoat

Over a single weekend, Turkish police raided gay bars and private homes, arrested hundreds, and set in motion a wave of state messaging about protecting families and children from unspecified threats. The Justice Minister, Akin Gurlek, framed the operation in constitutional terms—the state's duty to shield the young from what he called criminal networks and abuse. It was language that sounded almost protective, almost reasonable. But experts who study how power works in authoritarian states recognized the pattern immediately.

This is not new. What is new is the intensity. Dr. Koen Slootmaeckers, who teaches international politics at City St George's, University of London, has watched similar campaigns unfold across Eastern Europe and beyond. He told Deutsche Welle that Turkey's latest action fits a larger picture: as far-right movements gain ground globally, they target anything perceived as different, anything that challenges what they call traditional family values. The narrative is always the same—us versus them, order versus chaos, the nation's future versus those who threaten it.

What makes this pattern so effective, Slootmaeckers argues, is that it often has little to do with genuine ideological conviction. Instead, it is opportunistic. When political power feels threatened—when a government faces economic crisis, military setback, or loss of public confidence—attacking LGBTQ+ communities becomes a low-cost way to redirect anger and fear. The regime claims these communities are a danger to the social fabric. It creates a visible enemy. It distracts from the actual failures of governance. And it works.

The evidence is global and accelerating. A 2026 report from Civicus, a South Africa-based civil rights organization, concluded that women's and LGBTQ+ people's rights are under the most coordinated and wide-ranging attack in decades. The report explicitly names the United States under President Donald Trump as having set the global narrative. Meanwhile, same-sex relationships have been newly criminalized in Burkina Faso and Trinidad and Tobago. Turkey itself ranks 47th out of 49 countries on the Rainbow Map, an annual assessment by the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association—a measure of how hostile a nation's laws and policies are to LGBTQ+ people. But the countries that concern observers most are those sliding backward. Serbia, once closer to European standards, has dropped to 29th place, below the European average. Groups linked to President Aleksandar Vucic and his Serbian Progressive Party have been connected to waves of violence against LGBTQ+ people. An EU survey found that 80 percent of Serbian LGBTQ+ respondents said they avoid holding their partner's hand in public out of fear.

Serbia presents a case study in how these tactics work even when formal criminalization is not on the table. The country still wants to join the European Union, which creates what Slootmaeckers calls guardrails—pressure to maintain certain standards. Yet Vucic has still moved to cancel EuroPride, a pan-European LGBTQ+ event scheduled for Belgrade in 2022, when he felt politically threatened by the Kosovo situation. The message was clear: when the regime's power is questioned, LGBTQ+ rights become expendable, reframed as expensive frivolity distracting from real national concerns.

The same logic appears across Europe. Hungary and Poland have used similar tactics. In each case, the underlying mechanism is the same: invoke family values, conflate homosexuality with pedophilia (a connection experts say is being deliberately revived in political discourse), position LGBTQ+ rights as a threat to children and national continuity, and watch as public opinion hardens and civil society fractures. Kaos GL, a Turkish rights group whose offices were raided in the recent crackdown, called the operation state-led discrimination and the dismantling of civil society. For LGBTQ+ people across authoritarian regimes, the threat is not abstract. It is raids, arrests, violence, and the slow normalization of their exclusion from public life.