Mass protests in Istanbul have rekindled old notions about the role of young people in political resistance to authoritarianism – but just below the surface there’s anxiety and fragmentation
On the 19th of March this year, Ekrem İmamoğlu, the leader of Turkey’s main opposition party and Istanbul’s charismatic mayor, was arrested. Days away from becoming the Republican People’s Party’s (CHP) presidential candidate, İmamoğlu’s sudden removal from the political stage was seen by his supporters as nothing less than “a coup against our next president.” Tens of thousands answered the call to protest. A human tide surged through Istanbul, fuelled by a sense that history had finally found its moment. The district of Saraçhane became the focal point.
The sheer energy mobilised in Saraçhane electrified the opposition. The scenes seemed to confirm what many had hoped: that young people – so often dismissed as apathetic or docile – were still capable of defying water cannons and riot shields. University students, in particular, emerged as the bright new protagonists of this drama. They mounted barricades, braved tear gas and reclaimed an old idea, an echo of Paris 1968: that students are the vanguard of Turkey’s restless democracy. Belying the notion of Generation Z’s softness, word spread through the streets that “a generation as hard as stone is coming”, one ready to pick up the mantle of democratic defence in the face of authority.
Ulaş Tol, a sociologist, seems determined to complicate this seductive picture. Writing for Birikim Magazine, Tol tries to make sense of Turkey’s “ungraspable youth” – tutunamayan gençlik in Turkish – not by romanticising them, but by sifting through data, surveys, and hard truths to try and understand them. The British novelist E.M. Forster wrote that “youth matter[s] intellectually” – which they undoubtedly do. But Tol analyses them sociologically, uncovering a present-day condition defined as much by anxiety and exclusion as by idealism and rebellion.
He reminds us that behind the defiance of Saraçhane lies an accumulated burden of psychological strain. Today’s young people, he observes, carry an almost existential sense that no matter how they strive, they will remain trapped in a rigged game, one where justice erodes, nepotism thrives and meritocracy is little more than a fairy tale. It is a generation whose youth has been endlessly postponed, suspended in a limbo of deferred dreams and simmering discontent.
Look closely at those crowds in Saraçhane, Tol suggests, and you’ll see they are not solely the domain of the university student or the middle-class idealist. Yes, student movements sparked the admiration of the nation, but interwoven into those protests were countless young people who belong to neither classroom nor workplace. This precarious cohort, the NEETs (Not in Education, Employment or Training), the so-called “sitting youth” – oturan gençler in Turkish – defy easy slogans and photo-op narratives. Their idleness – which shouldn’t be mistaken for passivity – is itself a quiet form of protest, a symptom of being shut out of an economy that makes no room for them.
It would be comforting, the article says, to imagine these young people as a single bloc ready to rescue Turkey from democratic backsliding. But Tol warns against such consoling illusions. Age, he points out, is an unstable marker; youth is a fluid, almost mythic category that shifts with circumstance. The values attributed to Generation Z – secular, progressive, cosmopolitan – are not evenly distributed. Many are just as likely to drift towards nationalism and deep-seated resentment, a volatile brew made more potent by a sense of betrayal by both elites and the system at large.
The result of Tol’s analysis is an uneasy portrait of a generation both hopeful and fractured. Their anger, he writes, is directed not only at those who hold power, but also at those perceived to have escaped: the secular, educated, comfortable classes who are just privileged enough to have been able to leave. In these crowds of “‘lumpen’ youth” Marx’s old concept of the Lumpenproletariat finds new life: disaffected, disorganised and yet brimming with a dangerous energy that can swing any number of ways.
What, then, is to be done with these contradictory young people? Tol’s message is clear: the opposition cannot afford to mistake visible courage for uniform allegiance. They must resist the temptation to romanticise “youth” as a magic solution to Turkey’s current democratic malaise. If they wish to build a movement worthy of Saraçhane’s raw energy, the article suggests, they will have to grapple with the messier reality behind the barricades: the “sitting youth”, the anxious, the angry, the drifting. Only then can they hope to turn these scattered fragments into something more than just a fleeting headline, perhaps even into the cornerstone of a more just republic.
Original article (“Tutunamayan Gençlik”) by Ulaş Tol was first published in Turkish on 27 May 2025.
It’s available here.
Birikim Magazine is a Turkish leftist magazine with a long history: begun in 1975, banned by the military from 1980 to 1989. It has been online since 2005.
