By Nazlan Ertan
In Turkish, emekli / retired is supposed to be a word of closure. It comes from emek: labor, effort, the long arc of work, and implies that something has been duly completed. You have labored; therefore, you may withdraw.
In English, retired still conjures golf courses, hobbies, a gentle tapering of ambition. In Turkish, it can be used sardonically. Young people speak disdainfully of holiday resorts that cater to “emekli, bebekli, göbekli” - meaning people who are retired, have children or potbellies. It remains vague which of these three categories is worse in the eyes of young people.
STILL WORKING
But, putting jokes aside, in Turkey in 2025, emekli increasingly means the opposite: someone who is still working. Surveys cited by trade unions suggest that roughly one in four retirees continues to work — a statistic worth keeping in mind the next time your elderly taxi driver is unfailingly polite, slightly disoriented, and gamely trying to make sense of Google Maps.
Recent parliamentary debates on pensions have returned the word to the headlines, but the deeper story is not about a percentage increase here or a minimum adjustment there. It is about the quiet collapse of what retirement is supposed to signify. According to Social Security Institution data, the number of retirees working in registered jobs more than doubled between 2022 and 2025, rising from around 945,000 to over 2.1 million. Trade unions insist this is only the visible portion of the problem. When informal labor is included, economists estimate that nearly eight million retirees — roughly half of all pensioners — remain in the workforce.
TOO YOUNG AND TOO POOR
Retirement, in other words, has become a semantic paradox. The roots of this paradox lie in 2008, when a major reform law lowered pension accrual rates, weakened indexation mechanisms, and loosened the link between pensions and national income. Since then, the average pension has steadily lost ground. In 2002, the average retirement payment amounted to nearly half of per-capita national income. By 2025, it had fallen below thirty percent. Pension spending as a share of GDP stands at 3.7 percent, compared with an EU average of nearly ten.
This erosion sits uneasily alongside Turkey’s retirement-age profile. Statutory retirement ages remain relatively low — generally around 58 for women and 60 for men — and the effective retirement age is among the lowest in the OECD. Across much of Europe, by contrast, retirement ages hover between 64 and 67, often paired with stronger income replacement and social protections. Turkey’s model allows people to retire earlier, but not to live on what follows. The result is an odd inversion: earlier exits from formal employment, followed by prolonged economic insecurity.
What emerges is a two-tiered landscape of emeklilik. On one side are registered working retirees — experienced, skilled, often retained by employers who value institutional memory and pay social security support premiums. On the other are the invisible millions: retirees working informally in service jobs, construction, caretaking, delivery — low-security sectors where bargaining power is thin and age offers little protection. Trade unions call registered figures “the tip of the iceberg,” a phrase that fits uncomfortably well.
LOSING THE RETIRED
The government, for its part, points to progress. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan often recalls that the pension stood at just forty-three dollars when he came to power, compared with roughly 370 dollars today. He has described pension policy as a “debt of loyalty” to those who gave their working lives to the country, even declaring 2024 the “Year of the Retiree,” a proposal that was mocked by many journalists at the time.
The opposition is unimpressed. CHP lawmakers argue that recent increases merely trail inflation, leaving millions below a dignified living threshold; symbolic gestures, they say, cannot substitute for structural repair. Loyalty, retirees quietly note, does not pay rent. As of early 2025, the minimum pension remains well below the minimum wage.
Unsurprisingly, this economic squeeze is reshaping voting behavior: Recent polling by Ankara Araştırma ve Danışmanlık (Ank-Ar) finds while 35.4% of emekliler said they voted for the AKP in May 2023, only 25.8% say they would support it in a hypothetical new election, and support for CHP among retirees has risen from 24.9% to 35.4%.
