After a day spent walking in the sunshine to get to the polls and vote for Turkey’s opposition, 24-year-old Ayten gathered with her friends, excited to watch the results on television and scroll through Twitter. Slowly, as the election count went on, their enthusiasm disappeared.
By 3am on the morning of 15 May, when Recep Tayyip Erdoğan gave a triumphant speech to the crowd outside his party’s headquarters in Ankara, extolling his unexpected lead over the opposition and a surprise majority for his coalition in parliament, the young voters were still awake but their hopes for change had been crushed.
