As soon as a few hours had passed since last March 19, when the students began to protest. With improvised banners on cards, they congregated outside the faculties of the University of Istanbul in the alleyways of the Beyazit neighborhood. A barrier of dozens of rioturbia blocked them in the direction of the Saraçhane Square, in which the City Council is located, but the students began to push the agents, determined to march. More and younger came from behind until, with the strength of a flood, they exceeded the police. The images became viral. And they changed the history of these protests.
At that time, the Republican Party of the People (CHP) was still shocked by the arrest of Imamoglu, which four days later was going to proclaim candidate for presidential elections. He had denounced his arrest as a “coup d’etat” of the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, against his main rival, but the party, usually so allergic to get out of institutional policy, discussed what to do. The determination of the young people of the University of Istanbul was what moved them to do, as confirmed by a ChP leader to the journalist Rusen çakir.
“This action opened the way for the discontent that has been accumulating for years to take a concrete form. And that the CHP,” says political scientist Güven Gürkan Öztan: “Young people have been the flame that has set the protest and those who have made them continue with their creative mobilization forms, which have brought the policy to the public space again.”
In the protests that shake Turkey for more than 10 days there are people of all ages, but the young people who, in addition to participating in the CALLS of the CHP – this Saturday hundreds of thousands of people have protested in response to the call of the party – organize their own acts. They are a generation that has not known another government than that of Erdogan, who amounted to power in 2003 and has not left it since then – about 30 million Turks, a third of the population, has lived nothing else. “The university students are the most represented, but there are also precarious workers and even young people from the outskirts who come to clashes with the police to deflow,” explains Öztan.
The second group is represented by Deniz, 22, who despite having approved the access exams to the university, has not been able to start the race: he has been working for four years to save and be able to pay for studies. “The unnamed that is at the forefront of everything steals the rights to young people and puts us sticks on the wheels. I have not seen anything else since she was a child,” says this young woman, who, like other interviewees, asks not to use her real name.
Although, just a quarter of an hour after this conversation, the police will surround the young people and dissolve the concentration in the Sisli neighborhood, Deniz claims not Against the strings. “The police are not our enemies, but the Government,” says Mete and Ömer, two first -year career students, for whom these mobilizations are the first political act in which they participate in their lives.
In the squares and streets of Türkiye an amalgam of slogans is heard. From the Kemalist “we are the soldiers of Mustafa Kemal” () to the ultra -nationalist “Apo is a bastard, and will continue to be” (in reference to the leader of the Kurdish PKK armed group,), to immediately chant in a group a “elbow with fascism” or the verses of the communist poet Bertolt Brecht: “One can not be saved. “The militants of leftist organizations are far from being the determining part of the protest, but contribute their experience in difficult times, such as police charges or the attention to the injured,” explains Öztan. They are also with those who are primed with which Türkiye wakes up every day (the number of detainees exceeds 2,000).
For years there had been talk of an apolitical generation, but the sociologist Baris Tugul, from the University of Hazetpe de Ankara, who has initiated a study on the young people who protest, he does not agree. “Perhaps they are not politicized in the same way as the young people of previous decades, because the forms of socialization have changed a lot and these young people grew up in the conditions of disappointment for the defeat of Gezi [protestas en Estambul en 2013 que comenzaron con la defensa de un parque frente a un proyecto de centro comercial]. But they are not an apolitical generation, on the contrary, they are a generation of indignant, “he says.” There are even many who explicitly say that they come from AKP voters families [el partido de Erdogan]”, Points out.
Almost a quarter of the Islamist government has made and each time they identify more with the label of “ataturchist” or “nationalist”, while those who opt for those of “Islamist” or “conservative” have descended, according to a study on Turkish youth carried out by the Konda Institute last year. The continuation of the support for Erdogan – which in the 2023 elections reaped 52% of the votes – Kaan attributes it, a 28 -year -old, “the elderly.” “Many older have become blind sheep,” Deniz points out.
Although the CHP continue to focus its demands on the release of Imamoglu, for young people these mobilizations transcend a partisan issue. “In the interviews we have done, what most cite are concepts such as injustice, lack of freedom or despair and uncertainty about the future,” says Professor Tugrul. The arrest of the social democratic politician has simply been the drop that has filled the glass of the patience of young people, by eliminating the possibility of a change through the polls (Imamoglu is seen as one of the few candidates that can overcome Erdogan in votes).
“We are not here in favor of a party or a person, but for justice and the rule of law,” says Dray, a business student. The university students are particularly irritated by the fact that, one day before their arrest, Imamoglu was canceled their university degree (requirement to attend presidential elections), and together with him to him to 27 other people, including an academic from the University of Galatasaray, who has lost his job for it. The message for university students is that it does not matter what they strive in their studies if, in the future, their titles can be canceled for political reasons.
It is expected that, with the Ramadan festivities that begin this weekend, the protests will fall from intensity, but students expect only a break to resume them more strongly. A professor at the University of Istanbul, who asks to hide his name, considers that, in this case, the cost of abandoning protests is much greater than in the time of Gezi because, if not progress, those who have participated will suffer reprisals (in 2013 the Turkish government was not so authoritarian). After Gezi, says the academic, many knew that at least they would have the option to continue their academic or labor careers or even go abroad, two ways that now seem more difficult because the economic situation is worse than then and because the EU countries deny the visas to many Turks.
At the beginning of the 2010, having a university degree was a safe ticket for a job well paid in Türkiye. The Konda Youth Survey in 2011 indicates that the vast majority of young people, then, believed that studies and personal effort were enough to achieve success. In that year, 60% of young people thought their situation would improve within five years; In the same 2024 survey, only 36% of Turkish young people thought the future would bring them a better situation.
The social contract has broken, as in many other countries, although in Türkiye the process has been much faster and more deep. “All young people refer to nepotism. If you don’t have a relative affiliated with the party [de Erdogan] You have no future, no matter how much you have a title of a prestige university, “says the sociologist Tugul.” Just take its people, there is a lot of plugging. Our future is an unknown, ”complains to the students and Ömer.
The per capita income in Türkiye is $ 13,000 (about $ 12,000), the same that 12 years ago, but in the meantime inequalities have increased. According to Türkiye, it is one of the countries with the most inequality and 1% of the population controls almost 25% of wealth. Since 2013, the average cost of a rent in Istanbul has gone from 350 euros to more than 700, when the minimum salary – which they charge almost half of the workers – is about 550 euros. The purchasing power has also sunk: if in 2013 a minimum wage allowed to buy 365 lahmacun (A kind of fine pizza with minced meat), now only allows to buy 150.
“Fear? We are not afraid. In fact, because we are afraid in the past, we have reached this situation,” says the student I was: “Now we have nothing left to lose.”
