Turkish Style Democracy

Imagine a country. Imagine a ruling party that represents freedom of expression and religion to the rest of the world and many of your countrymen. Imagine progressive reforms and economic development. Imagine democracy. Then imagine authoritarian rule, restrictions on human rights and political freedom. Imagine protests curbed by police violence. Imagine this imposed on you by the very same democratic leadership, from the very same democratically elected party. Imagine Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and the urge to protest against him.

This description hardly applies to all Turkish people today. Although many comparisons have been made between Taksim and Tahrir, the Turkish protests of the past two weeks are far from the reality of the 2011 Arab Spring. It is not a populist movement against a dictator, it is a very selective movement made up of those who experience oppression from the current government. In other words, it is not the case that Erdoğan is a dictator clinging onto power. But it is a fact that he is shooting at his opposition. It is a fact that he is using ruling methods usually reserved for dictatorship. And this has been going on for several years. But the difference is that this time the rest of the world is watching.

In the early days of his political career, Erdoğan was at the receiving end of political and religious oppression. As the mayor of Istanbul he delivered a speech in south-eastern town Siirt in 1997, which nearly two years later had him removed from his post and sentenced to prison for “inciting hatred based on religious differences.” During the speech he had recited a poem by Mehmet Ziya Gökalp that reads: “Our minarets are our bayonets, Our domes are our helmets, Our mosques are our barracks. We will put a final end to ethnic segregation. No one can ever intimidate us.” Despite his sentence including a life-long ban from politics and public life, Erdoğan founded the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in 2001. Only a year later the party won a two thirds majority in the parliamentary elections and, following a legal change to get around the ban on political leadership, the sitting Prime Minister (and current President) Abdullah Gül resigned in 2003 to give way for Erdoğan.

Image Credit: OccupyGeziPics/Tumblr

One might think that such experiences with legal oppression would render some understanding of what it is like to be persecuted for expressing your views, but in Erdoğan’s case it seems to have backfired completely. Today, he is in power, and he claims to be distancing himself from dictatorship. Yet he has said that “dissent is legal only when expressed at the ballot box.” He sees it as the state’s right to impose their own moral values on the population while they are using public roads and public transport. He tries to impose his own beliefs on society, for example by restricting alcohol consumption and stating that every woman should have at least three children. He refers to social media, particularly Twitter, as “the biggest trouble for society right now.” His regime has been called “the world’s biggest prison for journalists” in Reporters Without Borders’ 2013 Press Freedom Index for jailing more journalists than any dictatorship (or democracy) in the world.

But as much as he is behaving like one, Erdoğan is not a dictator in the technical sense of the word. With parliamentary majority since 2002, the latest election in 2011 gave AKP as much as 50 percent of the votes. And, especially after the regions’ widespread protests against dictatorship during the Arab Spring, Turkey has been upheld as the democratic state whose example which should be followed. Erdoğan and AKP represent reforms in Turkey, particularly for the religious and the conservative who were previously discriminated against by the military. The protesters, on the other hand, identify with the secular state founded by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and as the father of the modern Turkish state he has become a symbol for the Gezi Park movement.

Image Credit: OccupyGeziPics/Tumblr

This deep division within Turkish society, between progressive and conservative, religious and secular, seems to be growing by the day. Unfortunately, the current leadership shows no signs of wanting to reconcile society. On his return to Istanbul on June 7^th after a trip to North Africa, Erdoğan is believed to be preparing for confrontation with the protesting part of his population. When addressing his supporters, he underlined that he is Prime Minister of the whole population rather than just 50 percent of it, and once again deemed the protests as “lawless.” And so, while Taksim Square heard chants of “Tayyip Resign” the opposing AKP supporters were chanting at the airport that “those who raise their hands against the police should have their hands broken.” The two groups keep getting more and more alienated, while Erdoğan refuses to acknowledge the protests as anything but marginal terrorists.

“They think they can start a revolution with their drunken heads,” an AKP parliamentarian proclaimed earlier this week. But, as columnist Burak Bedil points out, these “drunken heads” and their revolution are all over the world media. And they are not going anywhere.