The Brooklyn Rail

There is a saying in Turkish politics: “This is Turkey, anything can happen.” Deployed at the coffee shop or amidst glasses of anise-infused rakı to cope with tragedy or farcical politics, this state-of-acceptance is less zen and more resignation. March 19, 2025 began with such a sentiment as millions in the country watched the mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoğlu, getting dressed in his walk-in closet on a livestream, looking straight at his phone camera-cum-mirror, flipping his tie for a knot, in what had to be a rehearsed moment. The police were at his door to take him into custody on charges of corruption as well as for an informal electoral alliance with Kurdish politicians, allegedly at the behest of the Kurdistan Workers Party, the PKK. “There are hundreds of police right now in front of my house. We’re facing tyranny but I want you to know that I won’t give up. I love all of you and entrust myself to the people. I want everyone to know that I will stand tall,” he announced defiantly.

Imamoğlu had defeated President Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) three times for the mayorship of Istanbul—once in a repeat election after results were cancelled by Erdoğan. For the past year, since his reelection, Imamoğlu had been shaping up to be the main presidential candidate of the opposition, with a high profile on the national stage. But this is Turkey, and anything can happen, including just imprisoning your opposition. Imprisoning politicians and activists who pose a threat on the basis of fabricated evidence has been common practice in Turkey for the better part of the decade—ask anyone from the Kurdish political movement and they will provide a lengthy list of friends, comrades, and acquaintances.

That anything of arbitrary arrest was the standard we were used to. The other anything happened unexpectedly, however, some five hours later, at the gates of the oldest university in the city, Istanbul University. A few hundred students assembled to protest the arrest of Imamoğlu and as usual were met by a phalanx of riot cops. These five to ten deep masses of cops are the physical manifestation of what we in Turkey have been calling the wall of fear. This wall, both real and metaphorical, has been insurmountable for the past five years, and has prevented any mass opposition from manifesting not just in the street but in general in the public sphere, for fear of being thrown in jail without due process. At best, one can expect to be brought under state supervision and banned from leaving the country and possibly getting blacklisted from any potential employment. The only segments of social opposition in the non-Kurdish western areas of the country who have bravely faced down the police in the past years have been the radical feminist and LGBTQ movements.

The balance sheet of resistance for the last five years in the atmosphere of fear is not very long. In terms of workplace struggles, there have been a few localized small-scale strikes and a brief moment of self-organizing amongst the ubiquitous motorbike delivery gig-workers during the pandemic, when their services were in high demand. Additionally, there have been notable instances of struggles bringing together urban environmentalist activists and rural communities defending their regions from projects such as mines, hydroelectric dams, and other development.

On March 19, the suffocating and seemingly insurmountable wall of fear was breached when those few hundred students rushed the police, broke through and marched straight to the Saraçhane headquarters of the municipality of Istanbul. This perfect moment, conjoined with the calm yet resilient surrender of the mayor only a few hours earlier, was the viral clarion for the city and the country. Millions rushed into the streets with Saraçhane becoming the center of gravity, where a ten-day vigil interrupted by nightly clashes with the police took place. The logic and intelligence of the street caught everyone off guard as Erdoğan, his ruling coalition as well as the opposition party, Imamoğlu’s Republican People’s Party (CHP), had to reorient themselves amidst the rubble of a wall torn down.

 

Pushing the opposition to oppose

The CHP, the main opposition party, clings tightly to the memory of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the party’s and the republic’s founder. Its politics are a slightly left-of-center, staunchly secularist amalgam of moderate nationalism, progressive liberalism, and social democracy. In recent decades, it has been mainly defined by its invariant opposition to Erdoğan and the AKP. They have had a rather bleak electoral record until last year, marred by blunder after blunder in national elections, due to a failed political strategy of trying to defeat the AKP by making ever-more concessions to conservatism. The consecutive victories of Imamoğlu as the mayor of Istanbul and others in cities large and small, including the capital Ankara in 2019 and 2024, have given them much needed vitality. In late 2023, party leadership was wrestled from the old guard, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, by the more dynamic and in-touch leadership of Özgür Özel, signaling that all hope was not lost for the CHP. Özel moved the party rhetoric to the left on socioeconomic issues but without articulating an explicit left wing program. More consequentially, he shelved Kılıçdaroğlu’s strategy of trying to build a coalition with forces to the right of the CHP while relegating relations with the Kurdish left to behind-the-scenes negotiations. Özel has instead favored maintaining a more transparent positive dialogue with the latter.

This somewhat reinvented CHP was able to briefly surprise both its supporters and detractors by welcoming and encouraging the rebellious energy in the Turkish streets that erupted after Imamoğlu’s arrest. The masses had led and the leaders had little choice but to follow, in order to stay politically relevant as well as to thwart possible plans to put the municipality and even their party itself under the control of government appointees. The removal of elected mayors, university presidents, heads of trade associations and even corporate leaders by decree has been a central Erdoğan tactic in recent times. He has issued these proclamations under special powers he established after the 2016 coup attempt by his once allies, supporters of the exiled Islamic leader Fethullah Gülen. Since the 2019 municipal elections, Erdoğan has repeatedly arrested Kurdish mayors and taken over municipalities they had won fair and square. Out of sixty-five municipalities won by the Kurdish-led HDP, only six remained in their control three years later. Since the local elections in March of 2024, eleven Kurdish municipalities have been put under appointee control. These authoritarian measures are now also being used against the CHP. In November, three of their municipalities were brought under appointee control, and their mayors have since been arrested: a process reaching its apogee with Imamoğlu’s imprisonment.

It was this threat of appointee assignment which led hundreds of thousands to start a nightly vigil in front of the municipal building, as a means of preventing the building’s takeover by the government. The venue was also the setting for the main conflict between the real movement of the youth on the streets and the party leadership. This played out in the tactical choice between guarding the municipal building or attempting to march to Taksim Square.

Taksim Square is the most politically charged location in the city and the country. It is the site of a May Day massacre in 1977, when thirty-four people were killed; the location of occasionally riotous modern-day demonstrations; and, most recently, the focal point of Turkey’s contribution to the international movement of the squares in 2013, sparked by the struggle to defend Gezi Park. The crowds in front of the CHP rally stage made their intentions clear by chanting, “We’re here for action not to rally!” and “Özgür take us to Taksim!” and ultimately by moving towards the roads heading in the direction of Taksim, resulting in nightly clashes. These battles continued despite pleas from the rally stage. They were ultimately futile against a deep line of hundreds of riot cops, but their symbolism was powerful and effectively prevented the reconstruction of the wall of fear.

The energy spread to many other cities around the country, most notably to the capital, Ankara, where students at the historically radical Middle Eastern Technical University staged nightly marches attempting to exit their campus en masse to march downtown, resulting in clashes with the police blocking their exit. Inspired by their comrades from Istanbul University, it became clear that the vanguard of the movement in the streets were the university students. Both universities, like many others, have been under appointee administration for a while, their faculty-elected rectors having been denied their seats in favor of those chosen by Erdoğan.

After ten days of this ritual of vigil rally on one side and clashes on the other, and more than 1400 detentions nationwide, Özel and the CHP leadership opted to demobilize, announcing the end of the gatherings; in doing so, they started to gain control of the streets. They extinguished the energy of those coming out for political action into a boycott campaign that quickly fizzled out and then moved towards classic political rallies to listen to speeches, once a week in a municipality of Istanbul and once a week in another Turkish city. These rallies are continuing to this day without preventing the government from further raids against CHP municipalities. A shift in public support away from Erdoğan towards the opposition as a result of this demobilization strategy is not evident in opinion polling either. The only saving grace is that the CHP has gone out on a limb to organize rallies in the Anatolian heartland, in cities such as Yozgat and Konya, where the AKP and its ultra-nationalist ally the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) are the strongest.

 

Forever the Kurds

Although anything can happen in Turkish politics, almost everything is connected in one way or another to the five decade-long Kurdish movement for liberation. This is truer today more than any time in the recent past. Last November, the government—under the instigation of the MHP—made public its intentions of dialogue with the Kurds. They call it not a “peace process,” as previous negotiations were called, but the “terror-free Turkey” process. Like its name, the reality is as cynical as it gets: repression continues against those in solidarity with the Kurdish movement as well as the Kurdish movement itself, with attacks both on its legal political structures inside Turkey and on the guerrilla positions in Iraq and the semi-autonomous administration in Syria.

In reality, the armed Kurdish movement in Turkey had been decimated in 2015, following a nearly six-month long period of heavy urban fighting that came at great cost to the movement and its social support base. That protracted conflict was in no small part launched by Erdoğan who was forcing another repeat election after losing the ability to form a government for the first time in AKP history. Erdoğan’s electoral crisis was brought about by the Kurdish-led HDP winning an all-time high of thirteen percent of the vote, amplifying its effectiveness across all of Turkey after harnessing the energy form the Gezi Uprising of 2013. On a military level, the use of drones—which Turkey has become a global leader in manufacturing—allowed the state to conduct relatively low-cost strikes against guerilla positions in the mountainous terrain. Drone warfare created an inhospitable environment where raids on caves nestled in the ranges were once too risky to send in Turkish commandos or helicopters.

Thus, the PKK’s official announcement of its disbanding and disarming last month was an acceptance of the grossly reduced capabilities and horizon for armed struggle within Turkish borders. More importantly, it was a calculated compromise made to hold on to the Kurdish gains in northeastern Syria. In that region, known as Rojava, the Kurdish movement has both political power as well as a fighting force of tens of thousands, armed with US weapons acquired during the battles against ISIS. The fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria—a victory for Turkey as well as for the US and Israel—created a new geopolitical terrain for the Kurds to navigate, and the self-disbanding of the PKK is taking place within this delicate reconfiguration.

For Erdoğan, the end of the PKK, even if only in name, acts as a massive victory, considering that they have been the largest and longest thorn on the side of the Turkish nationalist project. The timing of this recent rapprochement between the government and the Kurdish movement couldn’t have been more opportune for Erdoğan. It has resulted in limiting support and solidarity from the Kurdish party towards the CHP to political statements, without calls for mobilization. Understandably, yet unfortunately, at times the focus was on hypocrisy: Kurdish activists remarked that the CHP is now experiencing the political repression that has been long normalized for them. On the other hand, some among the opposition accuse the Kurds of backdoor negotiations with Erdoğan with the intent to throw the CHP and Imamoğlu under the bus. It’s true that the Kurdish voting bloc, the third largest, has kingmaker potential. Their decisive power is even more apparent when considering that Erdoğan, who is at the end of his renegotiated term limits, would need either snap elections or a change in the constitution to remain in rule.

 

Gezi Remembered

Ever since 2013, the point of reference in Turkish opposition politics has always been the protests sparked by the proposed development of Gezi Park in Taksim Square, the center of Istanbul. Back then, a handful of right-to-the-city activists concerned by the loss of green urban spaces kick-started a month-long uprising that spread across the country and became a combative movement against the authoritarian, Islamic neoliberalism of Erdoğan. Twelve people were killed during the uprising. A handful of high-profile activists and prominent civil society figures—such as Workers Party of Turkey Member of Parliament-elect Can Atalay and philanthropist businessman Osman Kavala—are still imprisoned for allegedly organizing this spontaneous rebellion (deemed as a coup attempt by the government), and prosecution over involvement in these events more than ten years ago still hangs over the heads of many.

Pundits and commentators rushed to make comparisons between then and now. It’s hard to resist; even the youth in the street were holding signs that read: “The children of Gezi have grown up.” There were indeed qualitative differences between the Gezi crowd and this most recent one in the streets. Gezi had a more advanced praxis: dozens of barricades were erected to establish a communal liberated zone in the heart of the city, uninterrupted for two weeks, rather than this year’s fleeting evening rallies and clashes.

Another difference is that after March 19, we witnessed more Turkish flags and a stronger undertone of nationalist sentiment. This was not (yet) a fully toxic, far-right expression of nationalist politics—in fact, the bonafide nationalists of the MHP have been in a coalition with Erdoğan for the past nine years—but a meme-driven, shallow, and sometimes patriarchal and nationalist aesthetic fit for our era, and reminiscent of some of its Western counterparts. Along with the occasional anti-Kurdish discursive blunders from the stage, this was an important factor inhibiting Kurdish involvement. Some smaller nationalist formations defined by their anti-refugee hostility were also quick to feed off the sentiment of these mostly young and politically amorphous protesters. This was enough to color the crowds and create hesitation among some of the individuals who might have been present otherwise, including some who had been in the frontlines of Gezi. That uprising also harbored such undertones when it spread nationally, but this was eventually eroded through the leading participation of left wing groups as well as the eventual involvement of the main Kurdish political party at the time. Both segments of Turkish politics are not nearly as involved in the protests this time around, due to the intervening ten years of heavy repression and shifting political balances, both internal and external to opposition politics.

Gezi, despite the heavy toll of police violence, is remembered as a joyful moment full of wit and humor. In fact, one of the most salient critiques from the left is that Gezi and its legacy were so obsessed with jokes that people lost sight of the political horizons and battles for the sake of comic relief. In March, hilarious images of Pikachu running from riot police finally put the country back on the global radar, but the masses of young people were categorically different this time around: they had a more pessimistic outlook beneath their expression of political joy, with no pretense of building a new world within the shell of the old. The young people in Gezi had been full of hope and aspiration, their lifestyles threatened by conservatism but with at least an economic future to fight for. The youth of today have been thoroughly immiserated by the economic regime of Erdoğan and left with “No Future”: not a blasé, punk rock no future, but a basic, working-class no future. This generation, dismissed by those preceding them as apolitical social media zoomers, is now taking the stage. This is one parallel that holds: Gezi youth were also once dismissed as apolitical, until they weren’t.

The arrest of Imamoğlu was regarded by those in the street as the end of an electoral democracy that was already heavily strained and battered. Even if the basic tally of votes in past elections that resulted in Erdoğan victories had been accurate and not manipulated, Erdoğan achieved these outcomes with a firm grip on mass media channels, censorship, and curtailment of social media outlets at will; cancellations and repetition of elections not in his favor; and the imprisonment of leaders of opposition parties. However, since the economic austerity policies introduced by finance minister Mehmet Şimşek after Erdoğan’s 2023 presidential victory, the electoral fortunes of Erdoğan and the AKP have turned. Not only did the CHP capture most of the nationwide votes in the 2024 municipal elections, but Imamoğlu has been ten to fifteen percentage points ahead of Erdoğan in presidential polls since then. Hope therefore persisted for an electoral exit from under the iron fist of Erdoğan, the only leader young people have known, even if an election was not imminent. Imamoğlu’s arrest signaled the end of this hope for Turkey’s opposition, resulting in its indignant emergence onto the street. But the driving anxiety of the dynamic subjects—the youth and the students—is increasingly basic material survival.

 

Immiseration since Gezi

It is common for university students in Turkey to hold multiple jobs to afford basic expenses. One participant commented on the fifth day of protests:

All the students you see here have worked really hard to get to where they are, but they have no guarantees that they will even find a job four years later. There is no guarantee that they will be able to make money or survive on the money that they make. This is why we are here, for all the students—those who can’t be here right now, for those students who don’t even have enough to eat. Of course, these are the underlying reasons, but most importantly, we are here for “Rights, Rule of Law, and Justice.”

The scale of impoverishment is apparent in the trends. According to data from the Turkish Statistical Institute, almost half the working population (47.9% ) receive close to the minimum wage in the private sector, a 15% increase in the past three years. The minimum wage is now in striking distance to the average wage, exemplifying how any semblance of a “middle-class” existence for workers with higher education has been hollowed out. The distribution of wealth has become more polarized: in 2023, the bottom 20% received 6.1% of GDP, while the top 20% received 48.7%; the minimum wage is now 45% of GDP per capita as opposed to the 60% it was eight years ago. Those receiving the minimum wage are still among the fortunate: the most recent data put the broad unemployment rate (which includes those outside of the labor market, seasonal workers, and the underemployed) at a staggering 32%, even higher than the country’s highest numbers during the pandemic, and a two-fold increase over the past decade.

Macroeconomic indicators also paint a miserable picture. In the past decade, the value of the currency plummeted over ten-fold against the US dollar (the largest banknote is now equal to about five dollars), the inflation rate soared to 75% in May 2024, before coming down to 35% as of May 2025. Monetary policy has been schizophrenic, defined by economists as vacillating between unorthodox (lower interest rates at all costs) and orthodox (higher rates when inflation is high), the most extreme rate reductions correlating with the 70%+ inflation in 2022. Erdoğan at times voices Islamist rhetoric against interest to his supporters, pointing out that usury is a sin, but his interest rate zigzags are closely correlated with electoral cycles. Beyond the religiously orthodox rhetorical maneuvers lie unorthodox macroeconomic maneuvers.

Capital and capitalists are not a unitary bloc, and different sectors and interests can often come into conflict with each other. In Turkey, the primary conflict is one between the old-money, family dynasty-dominated, and more secularly oriented larger capitalists, organized under the rubric of the Turkish Industry and Business Association (TÜSIAD); and the relatively younger, conservative, AKP-oriented Muslim Industrialists and Businessman Association (MÜSIAD). While the former—having access to foreign currency, fixed capital, and cash reserves—supports high interest rates, the latter demands lower interest rates to service its Turkish lira debt (and to be good Muslims). Erdoğan walks a tightrope between the two, going as far as arresting the head of TÜSIAD for being critical of his policies (they combined their demands for tighter austerity with something that is a nuisance to him, respect for rule of law) while at the same time keeping interest rates high.

These policy swings have resulted in the cycling through of five central bank heads and four finance ministers in the past five years, most recently giving relief to the orthodox camp by settling on Mehmet Şimşek, whose CV includes seven years at Merrill Lynch and a brief stint at UBS. Interest rates jumped to above 40%, building a foreign currency reserve and slowly pulling down inflation. When the March 19 crisis hit, the Turkish lira dropped 12.5% overnight and fifty billion dollars of reserves were liquidated to stabilize the currency. Many saw this as irresponsibly wasteful, but what is a currency reserve for if not to rescue the ruling class from a political crisis? Furthermore, according to Marxist economist Ümit Akçay, the political crisis is the perfect backdrop for the AKP government to implement unpopular monetary policies, such as even higher interest rates. High interest rates hit the already immiserated proletarians who are living off predatory credit cards and are increasingly unable to make their payments: on average, each person in Turkey has more than 2 credit cards, and there has been more than a sixty percent increase in credit card non-payments in the past year.

Like clockwork, before each presidential and parliamentary election, Erdoğan increases the minimum wage and pensions, and implements other handouts such as bonuses and debt forgiveness in order to secure victory. The austerity program implemented since June 2023, however, has eroded support even among his voting base, and unless the situation improves over the next two years, he might not find the space to implement his usual election-focused economic policies. Tellingly, for the first time in AKP history, the minimum wage was not increased on a par with inflation at the beginning of the year—in the face of 45% inflation, workers received a 30% increase.

With their newfound blood, the aging CHP is attempting to rescue their political strategy from falling into the traps of culture (Islam vs. secularism) or ethnicity (Turks vs. Kurds), and has been highlighting the impoverishment of the working class. Imamoğlu has launched city wide initiatives such as “City Restaurants,” where greatly subsidized meals are provided daily, as well as free childcare centers, municipal dorms for students, and other social services. Özgür Özel has taken up material hardships in his campaigning as well, organizing rallies of the retired, highlighting the diminishing buying power of the minimum wage for basic foodstuffs—for many meat is now a luxury—in contrast to the lavish lifestyles of the ruling political class and their corporate cronies.

High symbolic-value handouts by the municipality undoubtedly help some at the edge of survival, and although talk at a rally is cheap, it still puts class politics at the forefront. But what the CHP lacks is any proposal for structural changes, either in governance (more democratic and local, as proposed by the Kurds) or in economic relations (as proposed by some of the independent unions). And, somewhat predictably when it comes to monetary policy, they tacitly campaigned under Kılıçdaroğlu for orthodoxy and thus were blindsided by Erdoğan. To what extent Özel represents a break from this overall framework is not clear.

 

Trump: Erdoğan on Steroids

One last note for US-based readers: looking at the state of politics in the US through a Turkish lens is eerie. Trump seems to be following the Erdoğan playbook, but in an accelerated manner. The clearest parallel is the attacks on higher education, which have been going on in Turkey for years, with many universities under appointee administration similar to the municipalities: a possibility floated by Trump for Columbia University. In the US, the reconfiguration of the judicial system was already well underway during Trump’s first term; now judges who aren’t towing the line are being arrested. Any semblance of due process is thrown out the window as Trump thumbs his nose all the way to the Supreme Court. Local elected officials like Ras Baraka, Mayor of Newark, New Jersey, are also being arrested for opposing his immigration policies. He is crystalizing his cadre with purges of once-close allies to build around himself a strongman cult of personality. He may well try to craft a formula for a third term.

Upping culture and identity wars is a tried-and-true tactic used by Erdoğan to rile up the electorate. Currently, this is going on under the theme of “protecting the family.” He has in fact declared 2025 to be the “Year of the Family.” This is where it gets difficult to determine who is following whose playbook. “Family,” here, as in reactionary Western politics, is a stand-in for anti-LGBTQ politics: Erdoğan’s current obsession. He gives weekly speeches fixated on LGBTQ people, blaming them for everything from corrupting the youth to falling birthrates. Government-mouthpiece newspapers and media repeat these claims to drive up hysteria, going so far as to equate being gay or trans with being a terrorist. However, it is encouraging that—in contrast to Trump’s attacks on “gender ideology”—this campaign has been met with ambivalence from the Turkish public and seems to not have caught on.

For those of us in the US or in Turkey committed to overcoming authoritarian strongmen—who are wrecking the world while either trying delusionally to restore US global hegemony or to invent a neo-Ottoman one respectively—it is imperative that we bridge the political culture wars and the economic class war. In Istanbul, the dialectic between the two is represented by the Gezi Park protests of 2013 and the clashes emerging from the impoverished students of today. In cities around the US, riots and uprisings increasingly on the horizon may also open paths for synthesis in action. Just like anything can happen in Turkey, anything can happen anywhere.