[TurkiyeAnalyst] Turkey’s geo-political clout has steadily risen across Eurasia in the past half decade since Ankara’s decisive military assistance to Azerbaijan in the 2020 Karabakh War, propelled further in 2022 by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Moscow’s ongoing military campaign. Turkey’s enhanced position in the wider Black Sea region has solidified its role as a geopolitical agenda-setter for Eurasian connectivity with Ankara proceeding to promote its long-aspired, Turkish-led connectivity program for greater economic integration with the Central Asia via Azerbaijan under the framework of Organization of Turkic States (OTS).
However, Turkey faces one force that poses a significant challenge to the realization of its strategic ambitions as a wider Eurasian power: Turkey’s own demographic decline. With the Central Asian republics’ experiencing robust demographic growth, enhanced strategic and economic integration among OTS members could result in a larger Central Asian Turkic influence on Turkey’s policy orientation and even a greater Central Asian Turkic presence with the Turkish population itself.
BACKGROUND: Turkey is starting to witness patterns of demographic decline resembling those experienced in the European Union (EU), where the death rate exceeds the birth rate by 32 percent and among the northeast Asian nations such as Japan, whose population is decreasing by over half a million people per year. The issue is not only population decline but the rapidly aging profile of Turkey’s population. Since 2001 when its total fertility rate was 2.38 children – healthily exceeding the replacement level of 2.1, Turkey has seen an astounding plummet in its fertility rate, declining to 1.48 in 2024. For comparison, the average fertility rate across the EU, last calculated in 2023, was 1.38, with eight of the 27 EU member states exceeding Turkey’s fertility rate and 19 member states with a lower fertility rate.
To grasp the magnitude and speed of Turkey’s demographic decline, a 1.48 fertility rate means that for every 100 Turks, there will be only 41 great-grandchildren, under the most optimistic circumstances. The accelerating nature of Turkey’s declining birthrates becomes apparent when mapping the geography of its fertility. Out of Turkey’s 81 provinces, 71 are below replacement level. Only the ten southeastern and eastern provinces of Gaziantep, Şanlıurfa, Diyarbakır, Mardin, Batman, Şırnak, Siirt, Bitlis, Muş, and Ağrı had rates above replacement level, with Şanlıurfa being the sole province with a fertility rate higher than 2.9. The geographic concentration of provinces with replacement level fertility in the southeast, means that the proportion of ethnic Kurds in the overall population is likely to grow significantly, affecting Turkey’s domestic politics and regional foreign policy. This dynamic is further compounded by the fact Turkey’s entire Black Sea coast, northern Anatolian region, and western region have fertility rates at or below 1.49.
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