📚The TL;DR📝

1. Turkiye (Turkey): 84,119,531 people, 75% Turkish, 19% Kurdish. Ruled by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan since 2014. Borders Bulgaria to the north, Greece to the west, Armenia, Iran, and Georgia to the east, and Iraq and Syria to the south.

2. Turkey has seen viral opposition protests in the past few months, with both Erdogan and his secular opponents trying to promote their visions of Turkish nationhood.

3. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, a Turkish war hero, led the Turkish state and promoted an aggressive, top-down campaign of modernization that attacked cosmopolitan Ottoman culture and Turkey’s traditional Islamic faith.

4. Islamists led a backlash in the 1980s, which culminated in Erdogan’s 2003 election. Since coming to office, Erdogan has promoted a more Ottomanist and Islamic vision of Turkish society, while consolidating control over the media.

5. His opponents have used social media and the internet to powerful effect, promoting an alternative vision of Turkish nationalism, as well as minority rights, through a combination of internet memes and social media-driven protests.

📌Memes, Morals, and the Future of the Turkish Nation📌

In March 2025, as riot police closed in on crowds in downtown Antalya, a figure dressed in an inflatable Pikachu costume broke into a sprint. Video footage, filmed on a smartphone, shows the iconic yellow silhouette darting through tear gas and a barrage of rubber bullets. Within hours, the clip spread across TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter. 

In a country where traditional media often ignores mass dissent, young Turks have taken control of the national narrative. They no longer wait to be seen by the state—they make their presence known. Pikachu, caught mid-flight from riot police, became the most recent symbol of Turkish youth’s frustration, resilience, and creativity. The moment was absurd, but its meaning was urgent: Turkish nationalism is being contested not only in the streets, but in the digital world, where a new generation is rewriting what it means to be Turkish.

🇹🇷Nationalism as Narrative: Atatürk and the Birth of the Republic🕌

When the Ottoman Empire collapsed in the early 20th century, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk led a revolution that replaced imperial pluralism with a secular, centralized republic. He forged Turkish ethnic nationalism as a means to hold together a fragile, post-imperial state. While the Ottoman structure maintained a system of religious pluralism, which allowed non-Muslim and non-ethnically Turkish groups relative autonomy, Atatürk viewed this diversity as a threat to modern nation-building. Soon after, in 1923, Atatürk birthed a new Republic of Turkey “for the Turks,” establishing a new Turkishness as an exclusionary identity. 

Atatürk’s project demanded linguistic uniformity, secularism, and modernization. He converted the Turkish alphabet from Arabic script to a Latin-based alphabet and closed most of the region’s Islamic schools. Facing backlash, Atatürk launched media campaigns to broadcast his uniform national narrative as he spurred the emotions of “new,” young Turks. 

Beyond this enthusiasm, Atatürk’s vision of Turkish nationalism harnessed narrative erasure. The state silenced the histories of Kurds, Armenians, and Greeks, portraying them as treasonous and primitive peoples. In 1930, Atatürk coined a phrase that became a litmus test for Turkish nationalists – “How happy is the one who says ‘I am a Turk.” Turkish identity became both a cultural and political “project of assimilation” with forced resettlement policies and language bans targeting minorities.

Despite his grand success, rural and religious communities came to resent Atatürk’s vision and aggressive secularization efforts. Political scientist M. Hakan Yavuz argues that “the rigid application of laicism alienated vast segments of the pious population,” eventually paving the way for political Islam to reemerge as a populist force in the 1980s and 2000s. Through this erasure of both ethnic and religious pluralism, Atatürk and modern Turkish founding fathers created a vacuum that later Islamists, especially Erdogan, would fill by motivating a more “authentic” Turkish identity rooted in Islamic values and Ottoman memory. 

Atatürk’s nationalism also targeted the remnants of this Ottoman memory. Rewriting the national past, his reforms offered a “break with Ottoman legacy” so thorough that Turkish history itself had to be “reimagined.” Textbooks uplifted Turkish pre-Islamic Central Asian heritage, omitted Ottoman cosmopolitanism, and forbade any mention of the genocidal campaigns against Armenians and Assyrians in the region. In this form, both modern and ancient, Atatürk fashioned nationalism that was designed to endure but also riddled with contradictions.

These selective ideas and forced homogenization remain central to current political struggles in Turkiye. Through his aggressive efforts as the leader of Türkiye, Atatürk’s top-down nationalism continues to dominate official narratives. However, current leaders have taken strides to reshape his vision. Today, young people, ethnic minorities, and Islamists have all contested the role of state actors in reshaping Turkish identity. What was once a unifying project now functions as a battlefield of competing memories and claims to belonging.

📺Erdoğan’s Media and the Return of Controlled Visibility📡

Before being elected president in 2014, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan accepted Atatürk-style nationalism but redefined it, and despite current electoral headwinds, his rule shows no signs of ending. In the last decade, Erdoğan has fused Islamic conservatism with a populist vision of national unity. He positioned himself not just as a leader of Türkiye, but as its protector against Western liberalism, Kurdish separatism, and internal dissent.

To sustain this vision, Erdoğan restructured the media landscape. His government gradually took control of major outlets. Critical voices were dismissed, arrested, or forced into exile. By 2020, more than 90% of Turkish media had been linked to pro-government interests.

Echoing the practices of Atatürk’s republic, Erdogan designed this system to enforce coherence: a single version of Turkish identity, sanctioned and amplified by the state. When the 2013 Gezi Park protests broke out, CNN Türk famously aired a documentary about penguins while demonstrators clashed with police just outside. That moment crystallized a public realization—media in Türkiye was no longer a platform for truth, but a tool for erasure.

🐧From Penguins to Pikachu: Social Media and the New Secular Nationalists📱

After 2013, the penguin silhouette transformed into a political meme. Today, the Pikachu costume has become a symbol. However, both moments captured something deeper than censorship—they revealed a generational shift. Today’s protestors don’t expect visibility from the state; they manufacture it for themselves. Their slogans travel via memes, their signs are scannable QR codes, and their protest videos are edited for maximum virality.

Social media platforms—especially TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram—have allowed diverse Turkish youth to build a counterpublic. Their nationalism is not anti-state but anti-erasure. They still fly the flag, quote Atatürk, and evoke national pride, but they do so with irony, remix, and resistance. Their tactics are hybrid, but their message is deliberate: the republic belongs to them too, even if they were never included in its initial, official narrative.

Nowhere is the battle over visibility more politically charged than in Türkiye’s treatment of its ethnic-minority Kurdish population. The state has long used the media to frame Kurdish identity as either a threat or a problem. Coverage of Kurdish language, culture, and politics remains limited or skewed. Parties like the pro-Kurdish DEM Party are often accused of terrorist affiliations and face constant legal threats.

For Turkish Kurds, social media has become a corrective. Kurdish journalists, influencers, and organizers are using digital platforms to bypass state-backed gatekeepers. They document arrests, share historical memory, and express political demands that mainstream outlets ignore. When Erdoğan recently sought support from Kurdish leaders to amend the constitution to extend his presidential term, the digital response was swift. Hashtags like #NeDeğişti (WhatChanged?) trended as users resurfaced past speeches where Erdoğan had denied the existence of a “Kurdish problem,” highlighting the contradictions of a nationalism that excludes but now courts Kurdish votes.

Social media exposed the fragility of state-crafted myth by addressing this ethnic marginalization and poor disaster response. Trust in the government’s narrative eroded, and Erdoğan’s long-cultivated image as a dependable national patriarch gave way to public disillusionment. Whether through hashtags or handheld footage, citizens increasingly reclaim the power to tell their own stories, complicating a nationalist discourse that demands loyalty but fails to deliver necessary protection or inclusion.

🪧Nationalism After the Filter—and Its Foreign Policy Consequences🌐

The story of Turkish nationalism is being retold—not just from political podiums, but from smartphones. For Erdoğan, nationalism remains a top-down doctrine: tightly controlled, exclusionary, and aligned with executive power. But for a rising generation, it is being reimagined through humor, protest, and digital solidarity. Their nationalism is not quiet but disruptive, plural, and fiercely visible.

The implications extend beyond Türkiye’s internal politics. Although imperfect, U.S.-Turkish relations have long relied on the idea that Türkiye is a NATO ally anchored in secularist democracy and strategic reliability. That assumption no longer holds. As Erdoğan deepens authoritarian control and weaponizes nationalism against opposition figures, Washington faces a more fragile and unpredictable partner. Attempts to manage regional crises, from Syria to energy transit, must now contend with a Türkiye where the official narrative often diverges from public sentiment, and where civil society increasingly operates in the digital shadows.

The viral image of a protester in a Pikachu costume, sprinting from riot police, may seem trivial. It isn’t. It signals a fracture between state and society, between enforced loyalty and grassroots identity. It also raises hard questions for U.S. policymakers: Can strategic cooperation continue if it rests on outdated assumptions about what and who defines the Turkish nation?

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