The ÜNİAK Fest, a youth festival organized by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) for university students, kicked off on Sunday in Istanbul with a spectacular ceremony. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the guest of honor, took the stage amid lengthy applause and pledged Türkiye’s continuous support to improve the lives of the young citizens.

"We never let anyone come between us and the youth, and we will not allow it in the future, either," he told a cheering crowd from 81 provinces at Istanbul’s Volkswagen Arena. The opposition parties, which lost successive elections to Erdoğan’s AK Party over more than two decades, seek to draw the support of young voters ahead of the presidential elections scheduled for June 2023.

"We are proud of our youth. They are our bridge between the past and the future. They have faith and courage in their hearts and God’s gift of intelligence. AK Party youth are the future of Türkiye; they are key to understanding the new centenary of the Republic of Türkiye," he said.

"I am grateful to Allah for being able to walk toward (the future) with this youth, to hand over the banner of our cause to them," he said.

The president said he devoted his life to serving his country since his youth, referring to his early days in local politics. "But recently, some people tag generations with letters and try to divide them. They try to create a perception of the generational divide through media," he said, referring to a debate over so-called Generation Z, whose members will vote for the first time in upcoming elections.

Erdoğan called on young supporters of his party to promote the AK Party at universities and boasted that the party has gotten the most votes from the youth and will continue having the most votes, too, in the next elections. "AK Party’s youth branch helped sign up 423,000 new members in the past two years, and overall, we accepted more than 2 million new members. As a result, the AK Party is ahead of other parties with more than 11 million members, far ahead of the opposition parties," he said.

The president listed the accomplishments of successive AK Party governments for the youth, mainly removing obstacles in education. "For years, children of this country were turned away from the doors of schools. They were deprived of university education due to inequality in school marks. Now, everyone is entitled to admission into universities," he said. He was referring to the late 1990s and early 2000s when girls wearing headscarves were denied access to university education under the shadow of the notorious 1997 coup.

Boys attending imam-hatip schools also faced injustice when their high scores were unfairly trimmed, and they almost lost a chance to score high in university admission exams. "For years, children of this country were challenged with university tuitions; they had to drop out of school because they had no financial means or dormitories to stay in. Finally, we solved these problems," Erdoğan said, referring to the landmark removal of tuition and construction of new dormitories.

"We ended injustice in vocational education by removing score quota for vocational schools for students at those schools to attend universities. We removed the headscarf ban for female students. We lowered the age of election first to 25 from 30 and then to 18. We supplied student loans for all students and increased the capacity of dormitories to 850,000," he said.