Turkey's Brain Drain: Why Youths See No Future There
by Burak Bekdil • August 1, 2020 at 5:00 am
SODEV, another pollster, found that 60.5% of youths supporting Erdoğan said they would prefer to live in Christian Switzerland with half the salary they would have earned in Muslim Saudi Arabia.
"These kind of social engineering efforts targeting the younger mind almost always end up with opposite results, primarily because the new generation do not like to be told what's good and what's bad for them. Freedoms for most youth are more important than prayers. This is what conservative politicians often miss." — Turkish university professor who asked not to be named.
In just the first 65 days of the COVID-19 pandemic, 510 Turks were arrested for "spreading baseless and provocative messages in social media." Before that, by the end of 2019, Turkey had banned access to 408,494 web sites, 7,000 Twitter accounts, 40,000 tweets, 10,000 YouTube videos and 6,200 Facebook accounts.
Erdoğan might sit down and ask himself: Why do the youths whom he wanted to make "devout" want to flee their Muslim country and live in "infidel" lands?
Turkey's Islamist president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, once declared his political mission as "raising devout (Muslim) generations." Research in recent years has shown that Turkish youths have defied Erdoğan's most ambitious social engineering project.
