The detention and arrest of Istanbul’s mayor Ekrem Imamoğlu gave an opportunity for anti-government sentiments and frustration to be openly expressed in the shape of large-scale protests that took place in many cities of Turkey on March 19, 2025.
A recent survey conducted by the Institute for Social Studies (Toplum Çalışmaları Enstitüsü), an independent thinktank in Turkey, attempted to make a participant analysis based on interviews with protesters in Ankara. To the question “What is your profession?” 61.1 percent of the participants answered “student,” which is to be expected when it is estimated that 70.2 percent of the demonstrators are between the ages of 18-24. The percentage of students among the participants dictates a need to focus on the participation of Turkish youth and, especially the student movement, in the protests and their influence on the Turkish political landscape of the future. This is a diverse young crowd, characterized by a Gen-Z aestheticization of collective action and a sense of having little to lose, but what drove them to the streets and on what terms?
An Apolitical Generation?
Older generations in Turkey mostly perceive Gen-Z as an apolitical generation, mainly due to the way that their close relationship with technology and social media has shaped their lives. Furthermore, the newer generation has never known life without the iron grasp of current Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP). Between the authoritarian pushback after Gezi, the harsh reaction to the attempted coup in 2016, and the pandemic years, these young students never had the proper time or space to build a political consciousness like earlier times. Yet, this reality does not seem to be so simple.
The Turkish Gen-Z is not indifferent to social and political problems; they just react differently. In the last years, there has been a heightened criticism of AKP and its policies among young people, starting from secular circles all the way to the Muslim youth, supposed allies of the government. They all express demands for more freedom and inclusive secularism. Many youth possess political awareness on matters such as women’s and LGBTQ+ rights, the animals, the environment, and global social justice issues. After all, it is the youth and students who have been supporting the feminist and queer marches of the last few years, marching alongside other groups like the Turkish communists, who follow traditional politics and organizations—even as opportunities for open engagement remain limited.
Still, not all youth fall on this side of the spectrum, with others adhering to the far right and non-traditional nationalism. The youth of the Bozkurtlar, the Grey Wolves, still exists, even if the radicalization of youth through the group seems to have been taking place especially among the Turkish diaspora in the last years. France, Germany and Austria, all countries with substantial Turkish diaspora, but also the European Union, have been debating ways to deal with the group with the necessity of a complete ban on it, due to its popularity among youth and the violent activities it seems to promote. Inside the country, there is also a newly- appeared group, or for some a subculture, connected to the incel movement, infused with nationalism and consisting mainly of young men; the kanzi. Kanziler are against everything: migrants, feminists, queers, leftists, Alevis, Kurds, and also Islamists. They are also against the systemic government, so they keep a distance from the far-right wing Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) and the Grey Wolves, even if they often use their salute, a fist with the index and the small finger raised. They are conservative, but remain secular and ultra-nationalists without necessarily supporting the Kemalist party, or, even, any political party. They have recently appeared in the public sphere as a potential threat.
This Is Why Our Slogan Is “Hak, Hukuk, Adalet”
In the light of the massive demonstrations, the protesting Turkish youth, despite the contradictions and opposing forces that it may contain, seems to be a bigger problem than expected for the tired authoritarian Turkish government. University students have been leading the protests all around the country, and for most of them, it is the first time protesting or even seeing mass demonstrations.
Friends who experienced the Gezi protests first-hand, as well as its aftermath–-such as political defeat and for many, exile— cannot believe that their young siblings are on the streets defying fear.
“Look how quickly they grew up; they were not even political!” they say with some pride. But a lot of the students feel that the label of apolitical is unfair. “They always criticized the youth as indifferent to politics, not knowing what to do. But it was us, the youth, that brought down the police barricade in Beyazit and said that we will have a say in our lives, and we will save our future. Thousands of young people surged to streets and squares and now continue to fight for their own sake. That’s why I am hopeful for the future.” (Şeyma, 22, Istanbul).
On March 29, the Republican People’s Party (CHP) held a rally in Maltepe, which, according to the party’s chairman, 2.2 million people attended. The number is indisputably impressive and the major political opponent to the government feels optimistic; all bets are truly off regarding the political landscape of the future. However, and without denying the popularity of Ekrem İmamoğlu, could the support for the now official next presidential candidate be the main driving force behind youth resistance?
For years now, the law in Turkey has been disregarded while basic human rights have been consistently under attack. Unlawful detentions and imprisonments of politicians, public figures, lawyers, journalists but also ordinary people who just published the wrong tweet, have been the norm. Queer and women’s rights have been also facing direct attacks, prompting feminist and queer movements to be behind any major mobilization in the past few years. Authoritarianism, however, does not come alone. Inflation and the absence of income security and professional opportunities, among other issues, have cultivated a sense of injustice, especially for the Turkish youth. For many, the arrest of Istanbul’s mayor was just the last straw.
“This is not just for Ekrem İmamoğlu. Seeing the unlawful way that this happened made people afraid. The fact that they could do something so unjust in such an obvious and unapologetic way, it really shook people. It made us feel afraid about what is going to happen in our future and this became the reason for our mobilization. We are not the saviors of any party; we just want to live in a free country. Our main goal is “Right, law and justice” (“Hak, Hukuk, Adalet”) and this is why it’s our slogan. (Cansu, 20, Ankara).
A Double Depoliticization: From Streets to Universities
“We are witnessing one of the biggest movements since the resistance of the Gezi demonstrations and we can actually say that Turkey is currently shaking off its dead skin. This movement now is not a coincidence and being part of it is very important both for us and for the historical role of student youth. We take to the streets because we know that gaining our lives back comes through struggle.” says 23-year-old Berivan, an activist and university student in Istanbul.
These are indeed the largest demonstrations since May 2013 and the Gezi protests. Back then, a relatively small peaceful sit-in protest against the destruction of a small central park for the sake of the neoliberal urban development projects of the AKP’s government was attacked and subsequently transformed into massive demonstrations. Within days, the demonstrations spread to almost every one of Turkey’s 81 provinces and became a significant milestone in the history of social movements in the country.
The extreme violence with which the protests were met resulted in fatalities and thousands of injured protestors, and eventually tipped the scales in favor of the government. Since then, the AKP has employed harsh security laws, tight surveillance, and bans on demonstrations, which intensified after the attempted coup of July 2016 and the State of Emergency law it followed. The SoE was officially lifted in July 2018, but in reality, different practices and violent police crackdowns have repeatedly violated the right to assembly in Turkey and prevented mass demonstrations like the one that took place this March.
But while the government was on a mission to depoliticize the streets, there was also an attempt to depoliticize the universities. Student movements have played a role in the country’s political history since the 1960s, when they laid the foundation of the politicization of not only youth, but also other parts of the society. Turkish universities, such as Bogazici University in Istanbul and the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, established themselves as epicenters of political activism. The military coup of 1980 put a halt on many of the student movements’ political activities, but eventually brought identity-based youth movements to the surface of Turkish political life. From the 1980s onwards, Islamist, Kurdish, Alevi, and feminist movements saw a large part of their political activity taking place in student spaces, and the following decades consolidated the university as one of the most political spaces of public life in Turkey.
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, was hoping that religious conservatism and Islamist political values would bear fruits against this political tradition of student mobilization and organizing inside the universities. After all, the plan of the AKP government was to create a pious and educated Islamic youth, a future political ally that would support the government without hesitation or criticism. When this proved difficult to accomplish, universities were put under the microscope and the introduction of the presidential system in 2018, gave the president an absolute authority to appoint the rectors of almost all public and private universities.
What sparked the previous big student mobilizations in 2021 was exactly the appointment of pro-government rectors to Boğaziçi university. Back then, government officials directly targeted the students as “terrorists” and adopted a harsh anti-queer rhetoric.
“From one side, there is a similarity between that time and today because the mobilization started due to the removal of a public administrator. However, that was a well-organized action which stayed mostly confined to our university. Now we see a bigger and more diverse crowd, but there is a lack of organizing and police brutality that we did not encounter back then”. (Şeyma, 22).
The Dialectics of Protesting
Protests are terrains of constant change. It is a dynamic process and student protestors and activists can already see the differences on a day-by-day basis while the crowds increase.
The relationship between young protesters and the main opposition party is one of them. “Fundamental differences in the actions started when university students and young people criticized the CHP’s stance. University students, who marched from their campuses and then came together in Sarachane Square, saw the focus on speeches of Özgür Özel and CHP deputies as inaction. They wanted to voice their own words and concerns and started chanting slogans such as “we came to protest, not to rally.”. (Itır, 22, Istanbul).
A lot of the young protestors preferred the marches to take place in Taksim square, in a homage to the Gezi protests, and actually organized smaller protests, independent from CHP’s calls to action, in Beşiktaş, Maçka Park, and other neighborhoods.
For many, the solidarity the CHP party is so vocal about is not genuine. Many students felt that they were left alone on the streets and that the party capitalizes on their protests. “We go out to protest, and they call us to meetings and talks. Then they just leave while we stay there and get attacked. It’s not solidarity, I don’t know. They say they support us, but, in reality, they don’t and I really don’t like the fact that it seems that they do everything for their own gain.”.(Cansu, 20, Ankara).
The other obvious change is police brutality, increasing in intensity with every passing protest. On-the-ground reporting, testimonies, and videos on social media paint a picture of excessive force and violence against the protesters, and especially the students. The students we talked to in Istanbul and Ankara all confirm unjustifiable and excessive police violence: direct assaults to the crowds with batons, physical violence and plastic bullets, dispersing the crowds with the use of pressurized water from the TOMA vehicles, use of chemical tear gas and pepper spray from very short distances, and of course unlawful detentions and arrests, with 1879 protesters being detained and 260 arrested between 19 and 26 of March 2025. “The police are torturing! Police stations and courthouses become torture centers both for the people they catch in the field and for those who are taken into custody. You have already seen the news about plastic bullets and pepper spray. In addition, young people are tortured in many ways such as being beaten until they pass out, sexual, physical, and psychological abuse, strip searches, and more.” (Şeyma, 22, Istanbul).
Gen-Z Aesthetics and the Challenges of a Diverse Movement
An interesting dimension of the current protests are their aestheticization — in the protest, one finds protesters dressed in Y2K fashion and boom boxes blazing Rage Against the Machine and Turkish rap, colourful lasers blinding the surveillance cameras, protesters doing push-ups in front of barricades, and Pikachu running from the police. The signs of the protests complete the aesthetic mood-board. Next to widely-used ones, such as “Hak, hukuk adalet”, “Kurtuluş yok tek başına; ya hep beraber ya hiçbirimiz” (There is no salvation alone – either all together or none of us), “Gençlik ayakta, diktatöre direniyor” (The youth is standing up, resisting to the dictatorship) and “Gençlik biat etmez” (Youth does not obey), one will also find ones like “Eylem is brat” (Protest is brat), “Make Turkey slay again”, “Tayyip, I want to break up”, ‘Girls just wanna have devrim (revolution)” and “It’s Imamo, bitch”.
The young protesters do not care to appear serious, but they long to become viral and this is not necessarily contradictory to protesting for social justice. Instagram and Tik-Tok have been established as alternative political arenas and the digital mobilization around the Palestinian cause has seen similar examples of Gen-Z aesthetic as a tool to draw support and raise awareness. At the same time, Turkish youth may just want to have fun and a shot at free expression and agency while protesting. They are not the expected “pious” youth after all.
The main core of the protests may be a shared demand for justice, but the crowd is, as mentioned, very diverse. While looking at the photos from the protests, there is an image of a unity, where traditional Kemalists, different fractions of the Kurdish movement, ultra-nationalists, queers, feminists, and communists, all can co-exist, putting aside deep political differences for the sake of resisting AKP’s authority. This is due to what happened during the last elections: HDP, the leftist pro-Kurdish Party, did not join the alliance but decided to not field a presidential candidate in the elections, contributing to the sense of a united anti-AKP front. Many progressive parts of Turkish society, like leftists, feminists and queer people, also supported this fragile unity by voting for the CHP’s presidential candidate, despite their political beliefs and objections, as, for example, to CHP’s often anti-immigrant and conservative rhetoric.
A unity based on the resistance to the government is, of course, needed, as the opposition party offers hope for more freedom and a more inclusive political landscape. The differences between the different blocks however, should not be overlooked. Turkish people, and especially the Turkish youth, need to navigate them, since in absence of a common enemy, it is very possible that they will come back to the surface in a post-AKP era. In some instances during the protests, we saw it happening. In Ankara, groups of young men dressed in black, identified as nationalists, chanted nationalist slogans insulting Abdullah Öcalan, while many also used the hand sign of the Grey Wolves. In Istanbul, it was young men again chanting slogans or carrying signs with racist and sexist insults which made a lot of protesters uneasy and were followed by immediate reaction and calls for political awareness.
At the same time, a lot of student activists and protesters are worried about the absence of a clear organization in the protests and the effect this may have in the future. Many see the need for bigger parts of the society and professional sectors to step up with general strikes and boycotts. Students, on their part, have organized academic boycotts, pausing university classes and activities in both public and private universities all around the country, but mostly in Istanbul, Ankara, and İzmir. They all agree that, for them, this is a conscious attempt to influence the society in taking action and a call to “stop life.”
“We are stopping life and we are going to boycott in order to be able to say that we are insistent in our struggle against fascism, to show to those who are trying to subjugate the country and the universities that the university does not obey the “Palace”. If there is no autonomous and democratic university, there is no academia.” (Itır, 22, Istanbul).
How this diverse and fragile unity of Turkish society against the current government will play out is yet to be followed and watched. What remains non-negotiable is the strong demand of youth for change— a demand which cannot be easily contained or digitally censored anymore.
“Yes, we are hopeful. Because hope is no longer just an option. Today the hope of young people carries a struggle for freedom and justice, not only for their individual future but the society we live in. This is exactly why we come together, overcome our fears and resist. Because we know that we will build a free and honorable life in this country.” (Dilan, 21, Istanbul).
*The names of the young students have been changed for safety reasons.
