The year 2025 was not a chronological stop on the calendar for Turkey; it was a “year of rupture” in which the tensions accumulated deep in the social structure came to the surface. The events observed in the economy, education and politics were a declaration of a structural fatigue that could no longer be repaired with temporary solutions.
Figures and Facts
The economic picture has gone beyond the official data and turned into a struggle for survival. Increases in the wages of pensioners and civil servants lost their impact before reaching the kitchen in the face of the devastating pace of inflation. This period, in which university graduates were caught in the spiral of unemployment and pensioners in the grip of the housing crisis, which is a basic human right, was recorded as a period in which the injustice in income distribution was visible in its most naked form.
Education Masked Exploitation: MESEM
The darkest topic of the year was undoubtedly the child labor tragedies that became more frequent within the scope of the MESEM project. Children who were condemned to unsupervised and harsh working conditions under the name of “vocational training” paid with their lives for the structural flaws of the system. While the political will tried to justify this project as an employment success, this system of exploitation hidden under the guise of education created a deep rift in the social conscience.
Epistemological Rupture
In the political arena, social crises were tried to be covered up with populist discourses. In a period declared the “Year of the Family”, train ticket discounts or public guesthouse facilities offered to families who could not access basic food were the most concrete examples of the epistemological rupture in the administration. This understanding, which is completely detached from the realities of the economy and daily life practices, signed a tragicomic contradiction by promising such “discounts” to a society whose purchasing power has melted.
Youth The Original Unheard Cry
Youth was the most dynamic but most isolated subject of 2025. The protests demanding future and justice that sprouted in Saraçhane were confined to the narrow molds of politics. While the government labeled and criminalized these voices as ’the opposition's political move“, the opposition, in a big mistake, perceived the youth's appearance in the squares as a direct support for itself. However, the youth were not there to support the opposition; they were there to shout out their own unique problems and demands by finding the climate favorable. As a result of this miscommunication, the youth's pure objection was tried to be transformed into a political lever between the two poles, while the real problems again failed to find representation.
The Pangs of Purification and Polarization
This year, social polarization has changed shells and seeped into every neighborhood. The need for a “purification” of the common conscience has been voiced louder than ever before with the operations against the “criminal economy” rooted in elements such as black money, corruption and illegal betting, as well as the debates in the media. However, instead of a real confrontation in the narrow corridors of politics, this vital demand has been turned into a tool for the parties to liquidate each other. While signals of self-criticism from within the ruling party were swallowed by the status quo, those calling for purification on the opposition front faced resistance in their own neighborhoods.
Threshold of 2026
The message of 2025 is clear: As structural problems are postponed, vulnerability increases. An order in which children become workers, young people worry about their future and politics becomes insensitive to social demands is no longer sustainable. As we enter 2026, the question is whether we can resolve this accumulated social tension with a rational mind.
The way out of this crisis is to listen to the voices of the youth without instrumentalizing them and to move the ideal of “purification” away from political interests and onto a transparent ground. Otherwise, this state of epistemological rupture (detachment from reality) will evolve into an irreversible social disintegration.
A critical choice lies before us: Either we will be trapped in another year in which those who speak the truth are silenced, or we will remove this wreckage with a common will.
I hope that this society will never embrace incarceration.