An attempt to understand what is going on in the current wave of protests in Turkey. A text by the International Section of Perspektive Selbstverwaltung (Anarchist Organisation in Berlin) based on the statement „To Struggle Against the Order of Exploitation, Tyranny and Plunder!“ by a number of anarchist groups and organisation active in Turkey.
The pictures we see of the protests in turkish cities these days are spectacular and at times meandering between causing amusement and confusion: A giant Pikachu is being chased by the cops, young men are doing pushups while being under fire from cops using rubber bullets and tear gas, protestors using the Turkish national flag to try to protect themselves from the police, barricades being broken, opposition party members handing flowers and Simit to the cops, a man running towards the police frontline to ask for a lighter. It can be confusing to look at these images, amplified by social media as manifestations of a humorous Gen-Z protest culture. And it can get even harder to understand what is actually going on in Anatolia and Mesopotamia these days, when noticing that the liberal media unilateral chooses pictures of a Sufi-Dervish wearing a gas mask, while mostly framing the protests as merely an uprising out of anger over the arrest of an opposition candidate. In this short text we will try to step away from the sensationalist reports and take a look at the current developments from a different angle.
Image: Protester with a gas mask in Istanbul upholding a placard saying „The revolution will not be televised“. From: cpj.org
In a joint statement by diverse anarchist groups and organisations1, our comrades in Turkey made it clear, that the arrest of the politician Ekrem İmamoğlu2) was merely the immediate trigger that caused the often times militant protests which erupted that same day, but not it’s sole cause, as western liberal media would like to suggest. Not only did Erdoğan with his ever increasing authoritarian style of rule cause enormous anger among many sectors of turkish society in the more then 20 years of his and his AK-Party rule, Turkey is also a state fragmented into many different ethnicities, religious groups and political fractions – despite all the massive propaganda of turkish fraternity imposed on the inhabitants of these lands ever since the formation of the Republic of Turkey in 1923. In this article, we don’t have the space to make an in depth historical-political analysis of the past 100 years and how it lead to a political situation in which the turkish police is chasing Pikachu. Nonetheless we cannot understand the more recent past and the current political developments within Turkey without going back to the early years of the turkish Republic.
A dive into the past
When Mustafa Kemal, later to be called Atatürk (father of the Turks) declared the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, he did it from a position of strength he and his entourage gained from their military backround and the successes in the 1st World War. The military successes in the subsequent independence war in which western states essentially aimed at dividing the former Ottoman Empire into spheres of interests for themselves and their allies in the area further added to Kemals unique importance for the young turkish state. It shaped the borders around the Anatolian and Mesopotamian regions which until today are the recognized borders of the state of Turkey (mostly unchanged). Celebrated for this achievement, Atatürk and his entourage of supporters, later on naming themselves „Kemalists“ (in reference to Atatürks civil last name „Kemal“) saw themselves in the position to persue a programme of radically redesigning the ethnic composition as well as the the religious, civil and cultural life of the historically extremely diverse Anatolian peninsula and Mesopotamia. Their primary source of inspiration was the West-European capitalist and statist model – particularly French Republicanism and Laïcité3- and the official political programme was pronounced to be designing Turkey after this example.
In order to achieve this and to pacify any possible restistance against this programme, the turkish leadership (partly in collaboration with other national states) made use of methods which can be considered a continuation of the forced displacement and genocide imposed on the Armenians in World War I by carrying out a brutal population exchange with Greece, redesigning the turkish language by erasing a good part of the non-turkish-origin vocabulary, resettling the turkish populations of the country strategically to regions which priorly had been dominated by non-turkish minorities and enforcing the narrative of a united turkish nation on all the citizens of the country. Also, under Atatürks rule, women gained the right to vote and many other liberties which many countries in the western block did not have implemented at this point in time.
Image: Mustafa Kemal Atatürk holding a demonstration of the new Turkish alphabet obligatory for the country. Books and newspapers in Arabic script were banned. (Kayseri, Turkey, September 20, 1928).
Another important aspect of the Kemalist radical cultural reforms was the pushback on religious institutions by (amongst other actions) abolishing the califate in İstanbul, prohibiting prayer and the call to prayer in arabic and by dictating the contents of the friday sermons in every mosque of the country by the states religious institution Diyanet (Diyanet exists until today and also dictates the friday prayers in DİTİB mosques in western Europe). On top of that, the whole country was forced to switch to the Latin alphabet, practically ridding the religious institutions and leaders from their means of public communication for months and aiming to move Turkey closer to lining up with western Europe. It is very important to understand that the practice of pushing the influence of religious leaders out of the public life did cause an enormous amount of anger and resentment among the religious leaders and religious turks, particularly in the countryside. There was a large gap between their reality of every day life and the „blessings“ of the western bourgeois lifestyle enjoyed by the elites in the big cities. On top of that, religion had (and still has) an important social function. Subsequently, after many crackdowns on uprisings and resistance on this top down cultural revolution the country experienced many divisions – ethnically, between classes and more, with one of the defining antagonisms being the one between the religious rural communities and the urban kemalist. Understanding this element of the country’s history is important, because after many political movements and candidates who tried to change the states political approach towards Sunni-Islam had been jailed, killed or swept away by some of the 4 military coups in the prior 80 years of the Republics history, these factually discriminated and repressed religious communities were the voters that ultimately brought current president Recep Tayyip Erdoğans AKP4 into power in 2002 after he had been jailed for 4 months after reciting a religious poem and banned from taking official political positions until this political ban was lifted later on.
The establishment of political parties and a parliamentary democracy in the late 1930s resulted in strong religiously motivated opposition to the state ideology Kemalism and its parliamentary arm, the CHP Party5, which Atatürk had founded himself, aswell as in a quickly growing socialist movement6. To get a hold of these developments, the Kemalist elites of the country reacted by establishing a structure within the military and the state institutions, which was not visible to the public but reportedly shaped the political developments in the country immensely by political influencing the elected officials, hiring killer squats to eliminate opposition figures, influencing the judiciary and media, the brutal torture and killing of countless Kurds and socialists by the secret police of the Gendarmerie JITEM, and effectively carrying out military coups multiple times – amongst other reasons to prevent a religious conservative Prime Minister or to weaken the strong and very militant communist movement in the late 70s. In western Europe, the talk of a secretive conspiratorious structure like this is often deemed to be conspiracy theories, but the existence of a so called „Deep State“ is accepted and established knowledge in the case of the Turkish Republic. It was involved in many political scandals and murders, such as the Taksim Square Massacre in Istanbul (1977) which killed (at least) 34 protestors at a quarter million people strong may-day trade-union demonstration.
Image: Demonstration at the 1st of Mai 1977 at Taksim Square in Istanbul. Workers have armed themselves with sticks to defend themselves against the police. In the back a wounded worker is caried away by unionists as they flee from armed vehicles while the police is shooting at them from the surrounding buildings.
Whenever we want to analyse a new political development in Turkey, the potential involvement of Deep State structures have to be taken into account. A good example for this is the new process surrounding Öcalan and his call to dissovle the PKK. The initiative for this process was started and pushed by no one else then the fascist leader of the MHP-Party Devlet Bahçeli. This took most people by surprise, leading to theories that the deep state used Bahçeli in a moment of historical weakness of the Kurdish movement in order to make a step towards politically eradicating the armed resistance. This seems like a sound theory, since for a long time even the existence of a Kurdish identity had been treated as a threat to the success of the turkish national project by Kemalists – wether it’s the official politics of CHP or the more hidden and mysterious actions taken by the deep state. Still the secretive character of the Turkish Deep State makes it difficult to analyze these events and theories like this have to be taken into consideration with extreme caution.
Image: masked protester with a picture of Berkin Elvan, a teenager murdered by the police in 2013 during the Gezi-protests while he was out buying a bread for his family. He was his by teargascanister which was used as an impact weapon. From: cidemi.art
Different fragments to understand the current uprising
Now that we have discovered some of the historical roots necessary to be aware of order to understand how political developments tend to occur and play out in Turkey and which political fighting lines exist within the political landscape of the country, we can go back to what is happening these days in the streets.
On 19th of March 2025 the mayor of the metropolitan area of İstanbul and CHP politician Ekrem İmamoğlu was arrested on grounds of supposed support for the PKK and corruption. Considering the amount of corruption within the current AKP-MHP government and the fact, that government member and fascist leader Devlet Bahçeli just recently started a new process with PKK, these allegations seem ridiculous to many Turks (generally it can be said though, that the introduction/initiation of controversial topics/policies is often left to other politicians than Tayyip Erdoğan and later taken up by Erdoğan as a general tactic to make sure he doesn’t take political harm). Just hours after the arrest many thousands hit the streets of İstanbul despite a total ban of public gatherings. Generally it can be said that Turkish protest culture is way more decisive and militant than in western Europe (particularly in countries like Germany or the Netherlands). This might find its origins in the extreme amount of political violence and harsh repression that anyone declaring their opposition to the states policies faces. This leads to the fact, that people are very aware that they might have to sacrifice their health and freedom for their political ideals. Also, individualist tendencies seen in western Europe have not yet gained that much of a foothold in the collective minds of people in Turkey, leaving space for a more community oriented mindset (with all it’s complexities). It leads amongst other things to a strong culture of political hunger- and even death-striking as well as a much more militant and sacrificial behavior at protests. It might also be one of the reasons that, as our comrades in Turkey write in their statement: „the spirit of resistance has been preserved in these lands despite everything“. By ‚everything‘, they refer to the political history described earlier in this text as well as the most recent upheavals of these lands: wildcat strikes and workers’ resistances in various cities, the resistance of women and LGBTI+ people despite all kinds of oppression and violence, the continued repression of the Kurds and their resistance against it, the struggles against ecological destruction and massacres of animals living on the streets.7
Image: Protest in İstanbul; placard saying „Korkma“ meaning „Have no Fear“. From: cidemi.art
But what is it that made the people rebel and hit the streets by the hundreds of thousands and take such risks for themselves and their closest ones besides of the CHP followerships motivation to protect their most important candidate for the upcoming presidential elections? What makes the traditionally careful and law abiding CHP call for a boykott of companies and enterprises affiliated with the AKP/MHP-Regime in times of economic crisis? The answer is not a simple one, as the protest movement is fragmented to different ideologies and beliefs. It is not only communists, anarchists and liberals who flocked the streets of most major cities next to the CHP-supporters in the past month, but also many facists demanded the end of the regime. Particularly the fascist activity in the protests is rarely mentioned in western liberal media, as it would bring up the question of why those people hit the streets and protest, when a fascist party (MHP) is in government and many policies of the last 20+ years work so much in their favor?
Looking for instance at the Gezi Park Protests in 2013 we could also witness a politically extremely diverse protest movement which did include radical leftist groups, anti capitalist muslims, HDP8 supporters and Bozkurtlar (the fascist „Gray Wolves“ organization) in the same protest movement. In that sense it is not surprising, that fascists like the Gen-Z nationalist youth „Kanzi“, who are not in line with the current government (as for example the far-right Zafer Party leader Özdağ is imprisoned in the same Silivri prison like İmamoğlu already since early 2025), are joining the protests. Therefore the current wave of protests is to be considered just as extremely heterogenous as the Gezi Protest Movement of 2013. That is, because all these opposition members are affected by the increasing lack of political and personal freedom and the lack of freedom of expression brought about by the AKP/MHP government aswell as the economic crisis (more on that later). In that sense, the violent and brutal rule of the AKP in the past 20+ years can be considered a strong unifying factor for both protest movements.
Image: Protest in Ankara, where many young „Kanzi“-supporters show the fascist wolf-sign, a symbol for the fascist movement in Türkiye. By: AP
Many of the Gen-Z protestors attacking the police in ridiculous costumes (which by the way also is a means to conceal their identity – if one takes a closer look at the current wave of protests it is very impressive just how many of the protestors are wearing masks or hiding their faces in other ways in reaction to the brutal oppresion) never experienced a Turkey without the rule of Erdoğan and experienced countless shameless cases of political violence and corruption in their lifetime. Our comrades mention a series of examples in their statement: „[..] the endless murders of women, the oppression and attack policies against LGBTI+ people, the massacres of animals, the attacks against the Kurdish people despite the so-called peace talks, and the fact that the lives of millions of people have become unbearable due to the government’s policies based on oppression and coercion [..]“. Many more examples could be listed, but our space is limited here.
Another important aspect causing this (for many western observers chaotic and confusing) situation is the fact, that many Turks understand the political course of the country as a conflict between the ruling political cliques over the course of the country. This term refers to the long-term political struggle between the religiously motivated AKP and it’s popular support (particularly religious people) on the one hand and the social-democrat and kemalist CHP on the other. For many, it is clear, that the “Deep State” uses these competing ruling cliques to lead the Turkish nation-state project to success.
Image: Confrontation between the police and socialist groups. By: Khalil Hamral; From: AP
As our turkish comrades wrote in their statement:
„We see that this anger [at the current protests] is directed not only against the AKP-MHP government, but also against the CHP, which for years has been supposedly oppositional, but has been the government’s stooge in every difficult moment, restraining the possibility of social explosions in every crisis and directing energy towards the elections. People have realized that elections are useless and that there is no other way for liberation except struggle. At this point, it is clear that the people taking to the streets cannot be easily stopped by repression, nor can they be manipulated by CHP in line of its own agenda.“.
Anyways, this approach to understanding the wide-spread and diverse character of the current protests is one fragment of the picture. It is also important in order to understand why even fascists are on the street protesting against the government. It should be mentioned here, that there are theories suggesting, that possibly the deep-state structures were planning to use their influence to replace Tayyip Erdoğan with İmamoğlu in the near future. In this reading of the events, the arrest of İmamoğlu would be an attempt of the current administration to avoid being dethroned and if that was the case, many scenarios for the further development pop up. Due to the unclear and secretive character of the policies of the turkish deep state, it is next to impossible to come up with any sound theories on this which would be backed by facts and therefore one has to be very wary of such theories.
Image: Protesters in front of a building with three large banners; a Turkish flag, an image of Atatürk and another one with İmamoğlu giving a speech for the elections. From: cidemi.art
As a last important factor to understand the current uprising, we have to look at the horrible economic situation which the country has been manouvered into by the ruling government:
Since 2018 at the latest, the people in Turkey have been increasingly affected by an economic crisis and inflation. In 2014 1 Euro was still worth 3 Turkish Lira, today the exchange rate is €1 to ₺40,80. Concrete effects are unemployment, rising prices for housing, heating, basic foodstuffs. Soup kitchens in the bigger cities are at their limit, fruit and vegetables can be paid for by card at the weekly market, as many people can only buy their fruit and vegetables by credit card – out of poverty and also because the high inflation made carrying around the big amounts of cash necessary for weekly groceries highly unpractical. In Istanbul, a monthly salary based on the minimum wage is now below the average cost of rent and according to official figures 40% of the workers only receive the minimum wage. Our comrades address it in the following way: „[..] it is no coincidence that young people, the workers of the future and the workers of today, whose future has become uncertain, many of whom have to work at the same time as studying, are at the forefront of the struggle. The anger is also a result of the increasing impoverishment of millions of people who survive by their labor, their being squeezed day by day under the economic crisis [..]“9 Indeed, the harsh economic conditions and a factually non-existant social welfare state are uniting the people all over the country in the struggle for better wages and working conditions, even though the turkish state is doing everything in its power to conceal these actions. Since trade unions are heavily restricted, the country is seeing an ever increasing movement of wildcat strikes, which started with the worsening of the economic crisis & inflation in 2022. This form of direct action has become necessary and our anarchist comrades on the ground are working on documenting and evaluating the strikes. We recommend you, to check particularly the website of the organisation EYK (Endüstrinin Yaban Kedileri – The Wildcats of the Industry)10 where you can find reports on the ongoing strikes and further analysis (also in English). The immense amount of the wildcat strikes as well as trade-union actions as well as the desperate economic situation for so many people in the country at this point resultet in a raise of the minimum-wage of 30 percent. This measure, which may look like a victory of the workers movement, but which did not even meet the net loss caused by the inflation, did not result in a ceasure of the strike activities however. These important developments bring us towards a key point in the analysis of the current situation made by our comrades in Turkey.
Image: Wild cat strike close to the city of İzmir. From: www.yabankedileri.org
What is to be done?
In their statement, our comrades write: „We need to recognize that there are limits to what these protests have become today. There is a high probability that this reactive movement, which has no class character and whose political content and demands are unclear, will remain as a tool of conflict between the ruling powers or simply fizzle out. However, it also has the potential to grow, radicalize and achieve real, lasting gains if it is linked to existing struggles in terms of demands and methods. Since the beginning of 2025, wildcat strikes and workers’ resistances in various cities, the resistance of women and LGBTI+ people despite all kinds of oppression and violence, the struggles against ecological destruction and massacres of animals living on the streets show that the spirit of resistance has been preserved in these lands despite everything. [..] it is possible to strengthen the wave of struggle with class demands and discourses, and this is exactly what we need to do. We should be involved in this struggle, not as a pillar in the struggle for power, but in an organized way, with the perspective of articulating the current problems and demands of the working class, women and all those who are oppressed and discriminated against, and turning those into the demands of the movement. On the other hand, we must try to involve different sections of the working class, who are already struggling with strikes and resistances, in the struggle.“ In this part of the analysis, we can see the great importance of building class conscience and which role an anarchist intervention could play for this ongoing protest movement.
The goals however are enormous and the anarchist movement of Turkey is just a small political factor – as in so many places in the world. For that reason, as anarchist internationalists, it is of the highest importance to put the full weight of our solidarity behind our comrades in Turkey and to support their struggle to strengthen class consciousness overall and particularly the direct action of the ongoing wildcat-strikes. Our comrades on the ground are working on a project to map and classify the ongoing strikes – on the one hand to give the movement a class-struggle consciousness, but also to provide a kind of “toolbox” for organizing a wildcat strike. Besides raising awareness for this among friends and comrades, there is something very practical we can do here in western Europe and elsewhere to support our anarchist comrades in Turkey materially.
In order to finance the strike-map-project mentioned above in these economically so challending times in Turkey, we set up a fundraiser. Therefore, we want to ask you, dear reader, to donate and share it with friends and comrades: https://www.goodcrowd.org/building-consciousness-for-wildcat-strikes Even small contributions are much appreciated and support the activities of our comrades in Turkey!
What is going to happen next and where will Turkey head politically?
As we tried to show in this article, these questions can not be answered easily and oftentimes the intricate webs of power dynamics only become transparent in retrospect. Therefore we will not make predictions on the course of the current protests, but rather shift our energy into standing with our comrades in Turkey and their fight to play their part in the struggle. There is much to learn from both the history of resistance in Anatolia and Mesopotamia aswell as from the current struggle our comrades are fighting. Whilest our campaign for financial support is indeed an important initiative, we should be cautions not confine ourselves to this stage of internationalist revolutionary work. In western European ‚Soliparties‘ raising funds is oftentimes the beginning and the end-point of the engagement with struggles that seem far away. Practised by itself it rather resembles charity work. In order to become a threat for the capitalist order of this planet however, an order organized internationally, we, the resistance against it, have to do the same. We need to struggle together and learn from each other to do so. For that, we have to listen to our comrades, learn and develop to something bigger than ourselves. Therefore, we want to leave the closing words of this text to our comrades in Turkey:
„We must take this struggle from the street to our workplaces and from our workplaces to the street. We must not leave the fate of the struggle to what comes out of the mouths of a group of politicians in suits. For this, we need to create self-governing decision-making mechanisms in our workplaces, schools and neighborhoods where we can discuss our economic and political problems and determine our concrete demands. The forums that emerged in the aftermath of the Gezi Resistance were important experiences we have in this regard and we must develop and revitalize these experiences. This is the way for the struggle to be permanent and to achieve gains. We will win by resisting! Our strength comes from our unity!“
Image: Mass protest in İstanbul. Picture by: Ümit Bektaş
- Statement: „To Struggle Against the Order of Exploitation, Tyranny and Plunder!“ by Anarcho Queers, Anarchists from Ankara, Bilgi Gökkuşağı, Bizim Elimizde Campaign Group, Eşitlik Topluluğu, Heimatlos Kültü, Anarchists from Istanbul, Izmir Anarchy, Kuir Uşak, Autonomous Workers’ Associations, OzU LGBTIQ+, VeganEsk, Otonom İşçi Birlikleri. https://www.iscibirlikleri.org/2025/03/21/to-struggle-against-the-order-of-exploitation-tyranny-and-plunder/ [↩]
- Ekrem İmamoğlu is a member of the social-democratic-nationalist party CHP; mayor of İstanbul; one of the most promising candidates against ruling authoritarian president Erdoğan [↩]
- Laïcité or secularism is the strict separation of church/religion and state, which is enshrined in the constitution in some countries, or is practised in this way; often also control of religion by the state. [↩]
- AKP: Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (transl. Justice and Development Party); conservative-right, religiously orientated bourgeois political party with a neo-Ottoman foreign policy and authoritarian character; The party of current president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan; currently in a ‚people’s alliance‘ ‘popular alliance’ with the fascist MHP, which is the political arm of the Bozkurtlar (Grey Wolves). [↩]
- CHP: Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi (transl. “Republican People’s Party”) is the second largest party in the country. It was founded in 1923 by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, making it the oldest active party in the country. It is the main carrier of the state ideology of “Kemalism” and has also had a social democratic orientation since the 1970s, when the administration of Bülent Ecevit strongly shifted the parties positioning there in order to weaken the influence of the evergrowing communist movement. The party is contrary to the reception in western media from the outset on highly pragmatic and scientifically oriented and underwent numerous political shifts and reorientations. Side note: CHP party leader and prime minister Ecevit was also the first elected politician who publicly spoke about the existence of a deep state in Turkey, when he used the term „kontr-gerilla“ for this organisation. [↩]
- In the case of Turkey, by socialist movement it can be said that the overwhelming direction of the movement is authoritarian marxist parties of different fractions. An Anarchist movement that would go beyond some niché magazines would only develop as a result of the 1980s coup, where the centralized communist organizations had been abolished by the military dictatorship in an astoundingly fast way. Besides ideological disagreements, the forming anarchist movement of Turkey in the late 80s therefore also wanted to learn from this type of state repression by building decentralized political resistance. More on the anarchist movement in Turkey might be subject to another article. [↩]
- Massacre of animals: Since 2024, the Turkish state has been taking massive action against street animals. In the cultural self-image of the people of Anatolia & Mesopotamia, street animals have a high protective status, the big cities are populated by an incredible number of cats and dogs that are fed, cared for and loved by the residents. There are often small statues in memory of particularly iconic street animals and if the only free table in an İstanbul café is occupied by one or more cats, then guests are usually out of luck. The changes to the law in 2024 and the subsequent campaign to kill street animals met with great protest and resentment in the country [↩]
- HDP: Halkların Demokratik Partisi (transl. Peoples‘ Democratic Party or Democratic Party of the Peoples) is a pro-kurdish political party. Generally left wing, the party places a strong emphasis on radical democracy, feminism, minority rights, youth rights and egalitarianism. [↩]
- For german speaking readers, there is a good summary of the situation in this ND-article: https://www.nd-aktuell.de/artikel/1189822.proteste-tuerkei-gewerkschafter-im-visier.html [↩]
- https://www.yabankedileri.org/en/strike/general-strike-of-public-workers-january-2025 [↩]