GATESTONE INSTITUTE
Turkey’s Brain Drain: Why Youths See No Future There
by Burak Bekdil
August 1, 2020

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. Konda, a pollster, found in 2019 that Turkish youths were less likely than the wider population to identify themselves as “religious conservative.” They were less likely to fast, pray regularly or (for females) cover their hair. Ipsos, an international pollster, found that only 12% of Turks trust Islamic clerics. SODEV, another pollster, found that 60.5% of youths that support Erdoğan said they would prefer to live in Christian Switzerland with half the salary they would earn in Muslim Saudi Arabia. READ MORE