Turkish mass movement against Erdogan – Interview with a student in Istanbul

After the arrest of Istanbul’s popular mayor and President Erdogan’s main political rival, Ekrem Imamoglu from the Republican People’s Party (CHP), students have been organising mass protests and boycotts around the country, mainly in Istanbul and Ankara. 

We interviewed a Boğaziçi University student, LÇ, who has been actively participating in the protests against attacks on democratic rights.

Could you give an overview of why yourself and other students have been taking part in the protests against Erdogan? What are the main demands? 

As a generation which has only seen the rule of Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP), most students want to see Erdogan gone, no matter the cost. The main student community, like the majority of young people, are just completely fed up with Erdogan’s rule and are ready to do whatever it takes to get him gone. We just want him gone.

But we are also working for smaller scale victories too. Currently, one of our main demands is the freedom of our student friends who were jailed during the protests.

Are there economic demands too? Do young people see a future for themselves? 

Students don’t think they can manage living in the present, let alone thinking about the future. Right now, there is a housing crisis at universities, and there are so many students who are struggling so hard to find a place to live, to feed themselves. The economic crisis is definitely a big part of the protests.

But even before the huge economic decline of the last years, the desire for Erdogan and his party to be gone were cemented in this generation. So the economic crisis is only accelerating this.

After opposition leader Imamoglu was arrested on 19 March, the first protest happened at Istanbul University, but those protests spread very quickly. How is the student movement organised in Turkey? Are there action committees? 

In my university, Bogazici, we have been organising protests over the past decade on our campuses. So, we always had a working protest committee at our university to organise every protest on our campuses. We also had some kind of working system, and we have elected student representatives that try to make something work at the university through this system.

But the same cannot be said for other universities in Istanbul. They barely had any working elected representatives.

A lot of universities had to form a committee and develop their organisation skills in under a week, which obviously led to a huge chaos.

There is a universities coordination group that we have managed to establish, but we are not sure what they are supposed to do and how they operate.

Since we also have a lot of anxieties about undercover police officers among us and leaks of information, there’s also not enough information being shared with the rest. There’s a lot of people who are in the dark about how things are working right now.

At this point, most of the universities in Istanbul have some sort of protest committee where ideas get discussed and raised, and then proposals are made to the universities coordination group.

You said students are worried about undercover police officers. Since the start of the protests, Erdogan has resorted to even more authoritarian measures such as mass arrests and vicious police brutality. What effect did this have on the movement?

I have to admit that their intimidation tactics were successful to a certain extent. I have observed that a lot of students who were not too afraid when the protests first started are now feeling very anxious about the possibility of going to jail.

But I don’t think there is enough fear to stop students. It only makes students more cautious and develop safer ways of communication and organisation.

So there is greater amount of fear, but it’s mostly helping us tighten our security. And in addition to that, even if they are afraid, there is a huge consensus that we have the responsibility to continue fighting for our friends who are in jail right now. Otherwise it would be for nothing.

What are the next steps for the student movement? 

The most concrete idea about the next step is keeping up with the economic boycott. We are trying to establish special days of boycott as a regular occurrence, just like the one we did on 2 April, when no one spent any money, a complete day of economic boycott.

We are trying to establish this as a weekly occasion, and we want to keep this going as long as we can. But we do want to organise more protests.

We had to stop protests because of the extended holidays our president graciously gave us, so he could keep the big cities empty. But students have been very anxious sitting at home. They want to spill onto the streets again. They are very uncomfortable about the lack of protests.

There are huge concerns about the security of any possible planned protest now, since they are trying to scare us. Once they see that we are not scared, everyone is expecting more police brutality and harsher measures taken against us in the coming weeks or months.

So, there is huge fear around how we are going to proceed with the protests. But there is not a question about if we should proceedThe huge majority of students want to. We won’t leave the streets empty.

And through this, we also hope that we can persuade more people and trade unions to join the protests. Because if there is one thing we have seen in the Gezi protests a decade ago, once trade unions help and join together with the youth, then our force becomes much, much stronger,

And we are still talking about how we can continue the academic boycott, which is much harder to organise than the economic boycott, because not a lot of teachers are in favour of it.

And I do understand the anxiety of a lot of university students who do not want to fail their classes, because staying for one more year in university is going to mean having to afford living in this unaffordable city for one more year. So most of the students’ academic concerns are economically based. It’s more like, how am I going to afford studying even longer in university?

So our main idea right now is the continuation of street protests and economic boycotts and try to see which unions, which parties, we could get more direct help from, and try to get the more general public supporting the movement of the students and not leave us alone.

What is the ideological composition of the protests like? 

In terms of the main organisers, about half of them are students who are not affiliated to any political organisation and the other half are mostly members of left parties. And the organisers are mostly students who want to take initiatives and know enough people to get into that position.

The general protest crowd, however, is a huge melting pot. There are also ultranationalists on the protests too. Their major discomfort with Erdogan is that he is ‘selling our country to the Arabs’. Basically, it stems from the propaganda against refugees and how every problem stems from them, and they are angry with the AKP [Erdogan’s party] for letting refugees in.

So the most I can say is that protests are a huge mix of far left to far right and anywhere in between. What unites them is anti-Erdogan and anti-police feelings.

During the Gezi Park protests in 2013 it was a huge rhetoric of the protests that the government is trying to divide us between religious sects, ideologies and ethnicities. There have been slogans and placards that say: ‘When we are separated as Turks, Kurds, Alevis, Sunnis, leftists and rightists, we are not strong enough to handle the government.’ They want to divide us because they are afraid of what we can do when we are together. I think we need to reignite this understanding from the Gezi protest and try to unite.

Earlier you mentioned there are calls for mass boycotts and you also referred to trade unions. What is your expectation from the workers’ movement? 

It’s the call for a general strike that we need the most. And that has been a growing demand of the movement.

Also we need trade unionists to be with us on the streets if possible, because we are also in desperate need of groups, whether they are trade unions or not, who are organised enough and have experience of protesting.

Because at this point, there are a lot of students who are on the frontlines against the police barricades, against any kind of danger, and trying to lead these protests without any previous knowledge of how to do it.

So we need the power of the trade unions to call for strikes, as well as their experience on the streets, to help us and guide us and organise us.

What I think is that help from trade unions would be more about practical support than ideological support in the eyes of the student movement.

We want to build and continue with economic boycotts. Already we are making impact and irritating enough AKP officials with our boycott of their brands and companies with close relationship with the government. But we need a bigger impact.

We don’t see a way to persuade anyone into a strike, because everyone is scared. People are being taken into custody because they are supporting the boycotts.

And most of the problem is obviously the economic situation. Because even if there would be a lot of workers who would want to support us with a strike, without a call from their general union, these people are obviously afraid of a strike, because even without a strike, they are barely able to feed themselves. So without a proper organised call from trade unions, it is hard for any workers to join the cause on their own. It’s impossible in this economic situation.

The student movement has been the main driver of the events but formally speaking, the CHP has been in the political leadership. It is supporting the economic boycotts and they are calling for a snap election. What are your views towards the CHP?

I think my opinion on this is shared widely among students, so I can speak for the majority here. Most of my generation are not impressed by what CHP has done in the past years.

There is a huge lack of trust in CHP among the younger protesters, because most of their rhetoric and calls have been on the lines of ‘we will win this fight in the ballots’, which is not an idea that most students believe in. We believe that whenever we try and win anything by electoral means, we are going to fail.

In the presidential elections in 2023, everyone argued that CHP’s candidate should not be Kemal Kilicdaroglu. But no one’s voice was heard, and the CHP pushed with their candidate, which caused a huge amount of anti-CHP feelings among the students. We already saw them as pretty useless, but they started to appear even more useless in everyone’s eyes.

We were expecting Ekrem Imamoglu to be the presidential candidate in 2023, but the CHP gave the excuse of a potential political ban for Imamoglu in not putting forward him as a candidate. And I must add that Imamoglu is greatly popular with young people, because of some of the welfare policies he has introduced in Istanbul and he is a charismatic figure too.

The fact that the CHP is focusing solely on elections, while students understand that elections on its own is not enough, is one of the big divide between the student movement and the CHP right now.

The Workers Party of Turkey (TIP) is gaining attraction in Turkey among some. What do you think is the role of the TIP and socialists should be in Turkey right now? 

I really don’t know where the TIP stands and what they represent. And it’s not just me. Most people are unsure what they are planning to do and what kind of actions they will take to build the movement.

Compared to other parties, the TIP is seen as a less demanding organisation. They are able to gather students who are looking for a left alternative.

But that also means that their members don’t have unified ideas, they have quite a lot of different ideas in the party.

A huge question for us is what the TIP is intending to do.

The CWI is an international socialist organisation. Do you have a message for CWI members? 

The need for international solidarity is not just important for our success. My message for rest of the world would be that if we don’t gather enough support for the mass protests in Turkey and in the Balkans, then we won’t be able to slow down or stop the international rise of the far-right and fascistic forces. What is happening in Turkey right now would happen in the more advanced capitalist countries too. We need to fight together!

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