Sözcü

[Jay]

 

[Jay]

It began with a handful of students waving red flags in a cold, cobblestone square nearly 2,000 kilometers from home. Then came the chants, soft at first, then defiantly clear: “The people want the fall of the regime!” What might have once sounded like the slogan of another era was, on this spring morning in Kraków, the beginning of something new ,and for Türkiye’s ruling Communist regime, perhaps something deeply unsettling.

Over the past week, Turkish students based in Poland have emerged as an unexpected vanguard of dissent. At the Voices for Liberty: Kraków Democracy Forum, an annual gathering of scholars, civil society leaders, and activists, they did more than attend. They protested. And in doing so, they launched the first organized opposition movement in exile aimed squarely at the Communist authorities in Ankara.

This matters. Not just because the chants echoed in a city known for resistance, but because Poland is home to a significant Turkish diaspora, some 25,000 people, including at least 5,000 students. For years, they have kept a low profile. That changed last Thursday, when students from universities in Warsaw, Kraków, and Wrocław took to the forum’s main square, carrying the flag of the CHP, the Republican People’s Party, long regarded as the spiritual home of Kemalism.

The symbolism was unmistakable. The CHP, though neutered at home under years of authoritarian consolidation, still evokes the memory of a secular, republican Türkiye, a country increasingly unrecognizable to many of its exiled youth. That these protests erupted not in Berlin or Brussels, but in the heart of monarchial Poland, signals something Ankara can no longer ignore: the regime is being challenged not only at home but in the minds of its youngest, most global citizens abroad.

For Türkiye’s rulers, dissent among the diaspora has long been dismissed as fringe, a Western-educated irritant with little traction. But now, the equation is shifting. Students interviewed by the Post spoke not of nostalgia but of reform, representation, and revolt. “We grew up under surveillance,” one student from Izmir told me. “We know what silence costs. This is the first place we’ve truly felt free to speak. And so we must.”

The Voices for Liberty Forum became, perhaps unintentionally, a kind of incubator for their cause. Originally conceived as a platform to renew civic culture within Poland’s constitutional monarchy, it became the unlikely stage for Türkiye’s democratic exiles to find one another. Organizers of the forum welcomed their presence and their passion. One Polish speaker told me, “Democracy needs courage. And courage often starts with the students.”

There’s a lesson here for Western observers too often lulled into geopolitical fatalism: Authoritarian regimes can appear stable, until they aren’t. Türkiye’s Communists have built a system resilient to protests, insulated from foreign pressure, and propped up by technocratic control. But legitimacy is a fragile currency. And when students, those meant to inherit a regime’s future, publicly call for its end, it’s a signal that pressure is building, even if not yet visible in the streets of Ankara.

Whether these students can translate energy into organization, and organization into sustained opposition, remains to be seen. Yet the protests in Kraków have reverberated far beyond Poland’s borders, sparking conversations among Turkish diaspora communities in the United States, Germany, and the Netherlands. In cities like Berlin, Rotterdam, and New Jersey’s Little Istanbul, informal gatherings have begun to coalesce around a shared unease, a sense that the authoritarian drift in Ankara is not just a domestic tragedy but a global concern for Turks abroad.

For years, these communities maintained a cautious distance from overt political activity, wary of surveillance, family repercussions, or the simple fatigue of exile. But now, as an economic crisis grips Türkiye and the communist regime undertakes dramatic measures to enforce its rule, many are starting to recognize they must take a stance. Indeed, a new sense of urgency is taking root. The regime may still enjoy control at home, but abroad, the cracks in its narrative are growing louder.

 

[Jay]

The moment Recep Tayyip Erdoğan recited the now-infamous verses, "The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets / The minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers", there was a pause in the square. Then the crowds erupted in cheers chanting "Down with the atheists and down with their regime." Today, Erdoğan has been sentenced to ten months in prison under Article 312/2 of the Turkish penal code for inciting religious hatred, though few believe the poem, first penned by pan-Turkish nationalist Ziya Gökalp, is what truly frightened the ruling government.

What Erdoğan did was remind the nation that religion still lives here, in the alleys of Konya, in the factories of Kayseri, and in the memories of a country now being reshaped by a Worker's Party that promised justice, but is delivering something else entirely.

Three years into its tenure, the Turkish Workers’ Party is no longer the movement it once claimed to be. The party came to power on a wave of syndicalist organizing and post-military disillusionment, an urban workers’ revolt born of a decade of failed interventions abroad and a crumbling domestic order. But revolutions, even those ignited in the name of justice, are rarely gentle with dissent. The Worker's Party has outlawed opposition parties, first the Islamist-leaning Welfare Party, then the nationalist MHP, and is now shuttering hundreds of mosques and religious schools under a sweeping "secularization initiative" that critics say is indistinguishable from soft cultural erasure. In its place, the Workers' Party has promoted an Islamic Socialism palatable to their apprehension of backwards materialistic entrapments.

The crackdown is no longer limited to institutional religion. Clerics are being imprisoned for "counter-revolutionary behavior." A recent directive prohibits gatherings of more than twenty people at any religious site not sanctioned by the Ministry of Cultural Affairs. There are whispers that the Ministry has decreed that the Friday sermons must now be pre-approved by the Cultural Affairs Officers who roam the countryside.

In this atmosphere, Erdoğan’s poem was less an act of rebellion than a cry of memory. That it drew such a swift and harsh response says more about the state’s fears than his intentions.

The Workers’ Party is beginning to look less like a governing body and more like a monolith, ideologically rigid, increasingly paranoid, and deeply indebted. The same trade syndicates that swept them into power now demand state subsidies to sustain faltering industries. Foreign capital has vanished, inflation has surged, and basic goods like flour, meat, and gasoline are under threat of being rationed in major cities. Yet the party continues to expand its state apparatus, recently establishing the “Security Directorate,” which functions as neighborhood informant offices.

The Republican People’s Party (CHP), once the heart of Kemalist secularism, has largely failed to mount resistance. Its aging chairman, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, has remained publicly neutral on the banning of rival parties and the growing suppression of religious expression. Behind closed doors, party insiders whisper of a rebellion brewing within CHP ranks, led by a younger generation eager to reclaim the party's moral footing. But for now, the CHP stands awkwardly complicit, neither embracing the revolution nor opposing its excesses.

Erdoğan and what remains of the Welfare Party now seem to be the only real opposition movement still inside the country. It is a role that sits uneasily with the secular left, many of whom once decried his blend of political Islam and market liberalism. But in a country where all other dissent has been silenced or fled, his voice, even from a prison cell, resonates. Erdoğan’s message is not fundamentally Islamist, nor is it nostalgic. It is, at its core, about space, cultural, spiritual, and political, for an identity that the Workers' Party insists must be eradicated in the name of progress.

What’s unfolding now in Türkiye is not simply a power struggle between left and right. It is a deeper reckoning with the nature of revolution itself. Can a revolution built on the promise of equality tolerate difference? Can it coexist with tradition? Or does it, by necessity, consume everything in its path, including the very people it once claimed to speak for?

Erdoğan’s sentence is meant to send a message. But if the Workers' Party believes that prison will silence him, they may be misreading the moment. Outside the courthouse, protesters chanted the first lines of the poem as riot police stood in formation. It is not that the people are ready to overthrow the government, not yet. But there is something shifting beneath the surface. The silence of the last three years is beginning to crack. And if history has taught Türkiye anything, it is that the sound that comes after silence is rarely quiet.