No agenda

Some time ago, I interviewed a political scientist. The interview was not about the government, but of course we had to discuss the policies of the ruling AK Party, which is accused of trying to Islamize Turkey and undermine secularism. He said people had no reason to be afraid of any Islamic agenda in the AKP. In fact, he said, they don’t have any agenda at all, let alone an Islamic agenda. At the time, it seemed a bit easy to me to just say a governing party has no agenda at all. But since this week, I think the political scientist has a point. Different reports were published in which it becomes clear that the youth of Turkey is in trouble. Unemployment figures are high, which is even more problematic if you know that 60 percent of the Turkish population is under the age of 30. Twenty percent of them are unemployed, which is twice as high as the national average. Forty percent of this youth are doing nothing: they don’t go to school, they don’t work and are not active in any organisation. So you wonder what the government is doing to tackle the problem, what projects and strategies are carried out to improve prospects for Turkish youth. It turns out that the goverment has no policy for young people whatsoever. Nothing. Can you believe it? If they don’t have any policy about the problems affecting more than half of the population, then what áre they doing? I’m afraid we can safely say the AKP lacks an agenda.