The Neoliberal-Islamic Cancellation of the Future

After scraping by to reach a parliamentary majority and another Erdoğan presidency in 2023, the government had been following its neoliberal-Islamic agenda with relatively little disturbance until the upset of the 2024 local elections. Assaults on free secular public education were ramped up as many public schools were turned into what were originally meant to be vocational schools for training imams. This forced most families to choose between hard-line Islamic schools or prohibitively expensive private secular alternatives. Ministries have been outsourced to Islamic networks that fill in the void left by the downfall of the Fethullah Gülen movement after the abortive coup attempt in July 2016.

The cabinet, itself composed of representatives of Islamic networks, has been using the executive as a vehicle for parceling out branches of the government. The radical Menzil cult sweeps up lucrative public tenders, particularly in the Ministry of Health and carries out illegal Sharia-based “court proceedings,” most recently in the ongoing will contest among the heirs to its gargantuan fortune. The Presidency of Religious Affairs, a public body founded to regulate religious institutions, has a lavish budget that far surpasses those of key ministries. This body spends heavily to indoctrinate children from an early age in the Hanafi school of Islam, exerting assimilatory pressure on minorities like Kurds and Alevis. Moreover, the Presidency is repurposed as  the government’s semiofficial mouthpiece, providing religious cover for its policies and preaching obedience and patience: following the discontent created by insufficient increases to the minimum wage and pensions, its leader decreed that the solution was to “seek refuge in God.”

Notwithstanding the Islamist encroachment on social life, this social struggle cannot be oversimplified as a simple cultural clash between vaguely defined “Western” and “Eastern” lifestyles. Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) government has undertaken the most comprehensive wave of privatizations in modern Turkish history. These measures have often taken the form of opaque deals in which public assets are handed to favored foreign and domestic capital at fire-sale prices. In effect, this is transferring wealth from the public budget into private coffers as the loss is shouldered by the working people and exorbitant profits accumulate at the top. Yet, this process has also put a smile on the face of the Westernized, Istanbulite “secular” elite, who have multiplied their profits due to anti-worker legislation and tax deductions.

Ordinary Turkish citizens have seen a reduction in living standards and unprecedented inequality, fomenting a sense of financial dread as inflation crushes real purchasing power. Battle lines are defined in terms of democratization and authoritarianism, but this is in turn intertwined with the reality of witnessing years of cronyism, as well as the not-so-discreet exploits of a nouveau-riche class, such as the infamous young AKP member whose video of ingesting cocaine in a luxury vehicle was leaked online. Real and relative economic immiseration is intermingled with political animosity toward AKP as the culprit, which collides with the narrative of the “pious periphery” versus “secular elite” that it has often relied on.

The deep-seated frustration of condemnation to precarious work for meager wages despite earning requisite qualifications fuels the younger generation’s mobilization. The minimum wage is outpaced by inflation even according to unreliable government statistics and trails behind not only the poverty line but the starvation line, as a staggering 83 percent of the workforce earns less than 50 percent over the minimum wage. Consequently, meat prices are comparable to those in Europe while its consumption is comparable to African countries, Turkey tops the list in obesity rates in Europe, and chronic malnutrition among children is causing stunted development.

The current cycle of protests, as was Gezi, is sociologically saturated with the proletarianized youth, cognizant of the situation because they are compelled to be more economically literate than previous generations. They have firsthand experience of the context where the security and stability once associated with university-educated, white-collar work has undergone proletarianization. Many students deliver food as motorcycle couriers, wait tables at restaurants, work the register at supermarkets, and serve at coffee shops while undertaking studies, yet still struggle to make ends meet. The noticeable shift in militancy since the Gezi revolt is closely tied into this deprivation.

The erosion of the most basic liberal-democratic norms should thus not be read without keeping in mind the thoroughgoing cancellation of social rights that has created a generation that looks to the future with anxiety. There is a direct correlation between the proliferation of cults and this retrenchment of the social state and its repurposing in a neoliberal direction.

Particularly following the loss of the last general and presidential elections in Turkey, the atmosphere was one of demoralization and a sense that more of the same is around the corner in an endless loop of immiseration and corruption, propped up by a monolithic state mechanism that blocks all avenues to change. What were once considered entitlements, such as employment upon graduation, not to mention bygone welfare responsibilities of the state, are foreign to the contemporary protesters, who brush aside unsolicited wisdom from elders in recognition of their stark reality. The neoliberal-Islamic curtailment of alternative futures threatens to funnel the youth into a species of serfdom, wherein the neo-Ottoman sultan sometimes bestows minuscule rewards but more often removes the heads of those who think too much of themselves. The revolt therefore surpasses this or that candidate or singular action of the government, embodying a reach toward alternative futures.

Forking Paths

Even though the detention of the Istanbul mayor and his defiant stance provided the necessary spark, it was the students who literally broke through the police siege all around their campuses. According to a survey in Ankara, 70.2 percent of the protesters are within the eighteen to twenty-four age range, where the representation of this group within the total population is 10.3 percent. Of the participants, 94.2 percent are under thirty-five, suggesting that this is perhaps the youngest-ever crowd of protesters to grace Turkey’s political stage.

As is usually the case, it was hard to foresee such an eruption of anger considering the prevalent trends of resignation and acquiescence — and a scaling down of ambitions toward contentment with mediocrity. The lack of class association among working people and decades-long narratives of individual success have occluded a vision of the future as one of collective responsibility, and freedom. The neoliberal self lauds the lone survivor who sees others as their rival in a competition for scarce resources, a process wherein social bonds are dissolved and trust dissipates. This trend of atomization and its concomitant cynicism culminate in a loss of hope. The beneficiaries of this dark turn in the social psyche are all overlapping reactionary currents such as religious sectarianism, ultranationalism, and male chauvinism, reflecting global trends.

A prevalent tendency has been to search for paths to individual salvation where the future is traded in an endless monetary matrix: displaying a not-irrational type of behavior, many take a chance at investing in property or currencies, seeing that the value of the Turkish lira simply depreciates when kept in an account. Others flock to a more literal casino: the volume of the underground betting sector is estimated to be over $50 billion. A similar route many take to cope is sheer escapism from the grinding realities of the mundane: the illicit drug trade soars with alleged links to the political establishment, with methamphetamine in particular ravaging through socioeconomically vulnerable populations.

A report published by the Ministry of the Interior reveals that the drug is commonly used among people without stable employment, and the number of people trying hard drugs for the first time between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four is on the increase.  Atomization and cynicism have gone hand in hand with apathy and fatalism, facilitating social and emotional loneliness, along with a sharp uptick in mental health problems and suicide, both of which, once again, impact vulnerable communities the hardest.

The dormancy of hope does not signify its absence. Back in 2012, Erdoğan had proclaimed his desire to raise a “pious and vindictive” (dindar ve kindar) generation, implicating the sectarian motives of the AKP regime. Today that generation has grown to denounce the imposition of one religion.

The AKP regime, by its own admission, has not been able to complement its political monopoly on power with a corresponding ideological and cultural hegemony. In recognition of its lack of intellectual support, AKP policy has been an all-out assault on academic freedoms. Universities have been targeted by the government through infamous “trustee” (kayyum) appointments and sheer terrorization. Turkey’s universities have historically been restive as sites of contestation and protective of their autonomy. This resolve had been weakened with assaults such as the hounding of the Academics for Peace, which opposed the use of military methods regarding the Kurdish question in 2016. Many were summarily dismissed by presidential decrees, condemning them to perpetual unemployment and demonization, forcing many into exile.

Far-right gangs are often allowed into campuses to disrupt political organization through force and intimidation. These tactics culminated in a miscalculation that kicked off a local resistance when Erdoğan appointed Melih Bulu as the “trustee rector” of the prestigious Boğaziçi University in January 2021, leading to protests and condemnation for the attempt to bypass the university’s own channels. These protests, while locally impactful, remained focused on university injustices and failed to connect with broader working-class struggles. Crucially, they took place at a time when the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) under its former leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu had been making calls for the discontented public to wait for the ballot box, claiming that an outpouring into the streets would benefit the government, as well as focusing on a centrist alliance with anti-Erdoğan Islamist, right-wing liberal, and nationalist parties.

The current CHP leader, Özgür Özel, has remarkably begun to espouse left-leaning rhetoric, which he has recently adopted in response to the need to reach for the rich reservoir of struggle of the Turkish left. The main slogan of the movement “There is no salvation alone! Either all of us or none of us!” has been a socialist staple for many decades that CHP appears to have remembered.

This leftward shift in tone is doubtless traceable to the student militancy, and the organized — albeit weakened — socialist student organizing at its core. It is clear that the masses are dragging CHP out of its moldy centrist disposition, and that the main opposition party is not leading the movement. As it stands, the main opposition party stands at a crossroads and needs to recalibrate its relation to the future, considering whether it will continue to appeal to a nonexistent “moderate” center that has failed the center left repeatedly throughout the world over the last few years. Leaving a gap to its left, CHP has also unwittingly prepared the stage for a rejuvenated left-wing organization with an unabashedly socialist program, as is also familiar in other national contexts.

Toward New Futures

The current movement shows signs that a blossoming of revolt could capture both town centers and the collective imaginary. The new cycle of protests does not espouse an unconditional hope in the vein of the heady days of Gezi, and instead takes a justifiably more cautious approach. There are discussions of ways to establish some continuity and stability, as well as avoid fatigue through various forms, such as the currently ongoing one-day boycotts to suspend the regime’s much-needed channels of capital accumulation, and carrying on with smaller gatherings throughout the country.

This electrifying mobilization has a more “militant” hope that is more open to party politics than Gezi, which largely espoused the horizontalism in vogue during the decade of Occupy. There were mutual tensions and distrust between the variegated social movements in the Gezi movement and political parties, which tended to be considered as stagnant, corrupting influences on the spontaneity and creativity of the momentary collective discharge.

Socialist and progressive political parties have also undergone shifts in response to these mobilizations, and those that recognized the galvanizing potential of porosity between the party and movement, cadre and mass, and horizontal and vertical organization have enjoyed quite impressive growth and weight on the political scene. This is well-exemplified by the Workers’ Party of Turkey (TİP). Its flags and placards can be spotted all over the crowds, waved by members and nonmembers alike. The party has been growing at a fast pace, reaching tens of thousands in membership and about a million voters in the last general election due to its emphasis on mass organization with a view to building new left leaders in this fresh phase of social struggles.

The palpable economic grievances that animate the protests herald the potential to build a coalition of left-wing forces that can harness the dissipated anger around a coherent program. But to realize such a potential, progressive parties and organizations must take the plunge into the future. Those who nurtured the hope for alternatives must become students to the students and heed the direction that they are pointing toward: “Fight until emancipation!”