Equality as Demotion - by Nick Ashdown - Kültürkampf

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Equality as Demotion<br>For Turkey's professional class, Europe's flat hierarchies feel like a loss

Nick Ashdown<br>Jun 18, 2026

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Hi folks,<br>We’re back to the topic of emigration from Turkey, this time with a guest post by Nick Ashdown! I’ve been bugging Nick to write a post about this for a while, so I’m glad that he finally did.<br>Nick is a meticulous journalist who has been working on Turkey for well over a decade, and currently lives in Brussels, which means that he’s ideally suited to comment on this topic.<br>Note that Nick has his own Substack — Meydan — so do follow him for more of his commentary and reporting!<br>Best,<br>Selim

Istanbul, taken by the author.<br>A few months ago I inadvertently sparked a lively discussion about class divisions in Turkey after having an unexpected viral moment on social media. I wrote a thread on X recounting an anecdote about how some white-collar Turkish immigrants in Europe end up moving back after realizing they lost the perks they once enjoyed back home (this is a very specific subset of returnees; most people don’t move back, and those who do have many reasons unrelated to the following). These perks include a privileged, entitled social status accompanied by a kind of deference from most of the population, as well as an exceptional level of service provided by a huge, largely impoverished working class bending over backwards to tend to their every need.

I wrote that this group of Turkish returnees was used to being part of a “ruling class” in Turkey, and the loss of this status in Europe is partially what led them to come back. Ruling class isn’t quite the right term though. Turkey’s real political and business overlords have little reason to leave their sumptuous lives for Europe.<br>The professional class I was referring to isn’t a ruling elite, but rather a privileged managerial class and cultural elite; part of the top 30 percent, but not the top 10 percent. But this upper layer lives at several removes from the majority of the population in Europe’s most unequal country. The top 30 percent owns 87.8 percent of the national wealth in Turkey, compared to the bottom 50 percent, which holds just 3.4 percent. Meanwhile, half the population between the ages of 25-64 lacks a high school diploma.

Who Is Leaving Turkey?<br>Selim Koru<br>Jun 11

Emigration from Turkey into Europe and North America has been a very prominent topic in the last decade.<br>Read full story

This professional class may not control the upper echelons of Turkey, but, as another person on X wrote, they’re accustomed to feeling elite, and this feeling is what they lose in Europe. This is an especially bitter pill for the class that grows up being told they are ‘modern’ and European, but when they come to Europe they’re faced with the fact that A: many people don’t accept them as such, B: their education, language skills and western lifestyle mark them as quite ordinary rather than elite, and C: they sometimes find it much harder to adapt than expected, compounded by the fact that most Turks migrate to the more northern parts of Europe with cultures and climates most distant from their own.<br>In Noontime in Yenişehir, a 1973 novel exploring various social cleavages in Ankara, the leftist author Sevgi Soysal narrated a scene describing the awkwardness between two men of different classes [emphasis mine]:<br>Doğan assumed that when someone of a different class came to their home, people like Ali and his family would grow tense and flustered, unsure of what to do. Like the university janitors or building attendants who came to his family’s home. Whenever Doğan went to the building attendant’s apartment to let him know that the heating wasn’t working properly, the attendant would be baffled as to how to behave and, clearly feeling ill at ease, would make Doğan feel ill at ease too. An unscaleable wall would rise between them.

This resonated with me because I’d always been struck by a certain aloofness, leeriness, and even hostility from Turkey’s educated elite towards the majority of the population, regarding their fellow citizens as aliens, and huge swathes of their own country as a dangerous, foreign planet.<br>You can certainly find these attitudes and class divisions in every country, but like many rifts in Turkey, this one always felt starker to me. There are historical and political reasons for this, but also the basic fact that Turkey is a strikingly unequal country. The class tensions always seemed like a key component of Turkish society to me, and one that’s understudied by foreign scholars and observers more likely to look at ethnic, religious, and political schisms. One of the key characteristics of the Erdoğan era has been the rapidly growing economic inequality and the decay of the middle class.<br>Barbaros Şansal, a fashion designer and one of the country’s most colourful dissidents, once described to me Turkey’s “invisible...