It all began when Meri, a TikTok influencer from Turkey, mocked the makeup of Turkish women living in Germany. They were, she claimed, instantly recognisable by their bronzer, thick blush, false eyelashes and plumped lips. And the look favoured by the diaspora, she added, waspishly, had “nothing to do with how real Turkish women look”.
Reaction from the diaspora was swift and stinging. “You’re just jealous because we live in Germany,” one said. “If we stop coming (to Turkey from Germany), your economy will collapse.” Soon a full-blown social media feud had erupted, with insults and mutual mockery flowing. And, although it started with makeup, the row has gone far deeper, exposing old and bitter rifts over gender, class, politics, nationalism and economic power.
“It was soon clear a proxy war had broken out: a symbolic conflict actually dealing with something else, something deeper – which offered insights into Turkish society,” wrote the prominent Turkish German writer Hatice Akyün in Stern magazine.
Turks make up the largest single ethnic minority in Germany – 1.54 million in addition to 1.4 million German citizens who are of Turkish descent – as well as forming the biggest Turkish diaspora.
Most Turkish Germans trace their ancestry to the Gastarbeiter (guest worker) movement of the 1960s and 70s, when West Germany invited Turkish people, many of them from poor rural villages in Anatolia, to help fill a labour gap.
Akyün said educated elite women in Turkish cities still tended to look down on the daughters and granddaughters of the guest workers. She noted that the party of Turkey’s authoritarian president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, had come to rely on Germany’s Turks as part of its base, with more than 60% of the electorate living in Europe’s top economy voting for AKP even as it cracks down on media freedom and locks up its opponents.
One such dissident, Can Dündar, a Turkish journalist living in exile in Germany, sees the social media spat as a useful barometer of longstanding as well as current tensions. “It’s obvious this is about a lot more than style and taste – it’s an old conflict,” he said in the weekly newspaper Die Zeit.
The guest workers who had unexpectedly stayed in Germany and brought their families over “don’t fit in the classic categories ‘German’ or ‘Turkish’. They’ve spent four generations trying to make themselves understood in Germany as well as in Turkey and suffer because they’re not really understood in either,” Dündar said.
Many of the comments directed at the diaspora have a classist overtone: “They clean toilets and spend their money on makeup,” wrote one commenter denouncing the Almancı, a derogatory word for Turkish Germans.
The journalist Ayşe Yıldız said the spat also had a racist component, noting that in some cases Turkish German women were being dismissively called ‘Afghans’or ‘Arabs’ – intended as an insult targeting their darker complexions highlighted by dramatic makeup.
“It’s a way of denying their cultural identity,” she wrote in Berlin’s Tageszeitung.
Sexism is also in the mix, Yıldız said, with crass judgments about appearance reflecting “internalised misogyny” in both groups and often attracting men to the online chats who liberally shared their views on the attractiveness of the women.
The Turkish German writer Çiğdem Toprak said the tendency of Turkish Germans to opt for heavy cosmetics was a form of “resistance” against marginalisation, and in some cases against strong social and sexual control by their families. “Their makeup is a statement drawn with strong contours: I am here,” she said on the online platform Aposto.
At the same time, said Akyün, liberal Turkish women felt increasingly under threat and might well envy the freedoms in Germany. “Growing numbers of Turks are applying for asylum in Germany to escape the hand of the president,” she said.
In 2024, Germany received nearly 30,000 asylum applications from Turkey, putting it in third place among asylum seekers after Syria and Afghanistan, on top of the skilled labourers who arrived to work.
Naika Foroutan, a professor for integration research at Berlin’s Humboldt University, said there had been a global trend toward “ethnisation” among younger migrants in recent years, partly driven by the rising far right and widening anti-Muslim sentiment.
They had watched their parents fight to fit into German society only to feel rejected. “So they try another strategy: to make themselves more visible and recognisable as of Turkish origin, Muslim or Arab,” she told the Stuttgarter Zeitung.
“Youth culture is now very much influenced by the desire not to be ‘Alman’ [German],” she said. “Instead, young people with a migration background today consciously present themselves as ‘foreigners’ – and do so with confidence.”
