What do the traditionalists/whateverists in Turkey actually do?

[Nakkivene]

First time I played the pop-a-mole game with them, the next time I didn't bother and didn't notice them gaining ground actually doing anything. What are they?

 

[Emperor_Napoleon]

They give debuffs to things like recruitable population, building speed and factory limit.

 

[him_15]

Is it worth to spend PP to fix this?

 

[Gokberk Cakir]

You have traditionalists aka average Joes of the nation in more bible-belt like regions who give you bonuses if you go democratic and/or ottoman route where you allow them to be heard politically which involves allowing religion to be present in public / political space to some extent.

Then you have Kemalists which are secular urbanites who support the enlightened positivism of Ataturk which was actually enforced in Turkey with an iron fist because portions of population wasn't ready to embrace views that ignored all medieval dogmas.

So if you go down democratic and/or restore ottoman route, you get bonuses from traditionalist provinces and some maluses from Kemalist provinces. If you stay Kemalist, you get bonuses from Kemalist provinces and maluses from traditionalist provinces....

 

[Nakkivene]

Okay. Thanks. How large are the maluses, though, political power is scarce after all?

 

[AnssiA]

Unless you are going to go Ottoman route, you want to spam the secularism decision which will either spread Kemalism or convert the traditionalist debuff into small buff.

 

[Iskulya]

It's pretty cheap to spend 50 PP on the "secularism" decision after you ratify the six(or was it seven? I forget, lmao) arrows. It has a 50% chance of spreading the kemalist modifier to an unaffiliated state, or 50% chance removing the penalty from a traditional state and transforming it into a 5% construction speed improvement. However, even with the latter option, it will remain traditionalist forever. There will be no real way of removing that and replacing it with a kemalist modifier, so like AnssiA said, you want to basically take the decision as frequently as you can, at least until there are no more unaffiliated states.

You don't really want to ignore it either ,as the traditionalists will keep expanding until there are no unaffiliated states.

It might be different if you are taking the path in the focus tree to get Fevzi Cakmak. He has unique focuses to actively cooperate with traditionalists and turn those negative modifiers into pretty positive ones. I'm waiting for a patch for Turkey to get its missing research slot available before really playing around with it more.