What recent protests and Erdoğan’s defeat at the ballot box tell us about Turkey.
This Sunday Turkey voted a majority-less Parliament into office in a strategic attempt to block the ambitions of the increasingly authoritarian president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. To defeat Erdogan’s hegemony, voters shifted votes away not only from the secularist opposition party, the People’s Republican Party, but most importantly also from Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP). This is pivotal: it shows that previous supporters of AKP and Erdogan,religious not, are also beginning to disagree and divide, like the secular opposition has split from within. Defecting voters, wary of Erdoğan’s aim to change Turkey into a presidential system, put aside traditional ethnic and ideological identity politics and pushed the pro-Kurdish party into the parliament. The result is being hailed as a triumph of Turkish democracy in particular, as well as a victory against autocracy in general. The Economist Espresso already came up with a festive title: “So Long, Sultan: After Turkey’s Election.”
Although there is a long way to go for either the formation of a coalition government or for a potential early election in the near future, freedom-seekers have come a long way. Decreasing tolerance for Erdoğan’s heavy-handed governing style and increasing unity amongst his opponents have been brewing for years in cities, even many years before the 2013 Gezi protests erupted in Istanbul and expanded around the world.
Gezi at its peak was a remarkable experience, a breaking point in Turkish history and a crucial precursor to this week’s national elections.
The Gezi protests began two years ago on May 27th when a group of urban activists organized to save the Taksim Gezi Park from demolition. The goal of the protesters, who called themselves Taksim Dayanışma (Taksim Solidarity), was to ward off the redevelopment of the public park into a mall. Peaceful though the protests were, they were met with harsh police retaliation, which, in turn, triggered broader resistance not only within domestic territory, but also abroad amongst immigrants from Turkey. The demonstrations gradually came to be seen as an upheaval against massive violations of rights and freedoms by Erdoğan’s increasingly authoritarian government (who was then the prime minister).
Muted by Erdoğan during the weeks of the protest, the Turkish television channels showed documentaries of penguins, while the world condemned the extreme use of tear gas, tanks, and police beatings. The Economist published a cover depicting Erdoğan in the robe and headdress of an Ottoman ruler, and asked “Erdogan: Democrat or Sultan?” The New York Times displayed images of police brutality toward unarmed protestors on its front page and published the protestors’ charges. A passive protester, the “Standing Man” whose image was quickly spread around the world, was given a major German human rights award for his “courageous commitment to freedom of expression and human rights.”
Exactly a year after the protests I attended a talk at Harvard delivered by then-Turkish president, Abdullah Gül. It was during this talk that Emrah Altındiş, a postdoctoral scientist at the Harvard Medical School, gained public attention by shaming the politician. “How do you sleep at night when your prime minister [Erdoğan] declared a 14-year old child a terrorist?” Elvan, who had left home to buy bread for his family ultimately died from wounds he sustained when he was hit in the head by a tear gas canister during the Gezi. He was unassociated with the protesters—whom Erdoğan referred to categorically as “terrorists.” After naming others who had died during the protests, Altındiş said to President Gül: “Blood is dripping from your hands … How dare you are coming here [to Boston] to lie and preach about democracy to us?”
In a recent interview with Altındiş, he and I discussed the aftermath of the Gezi protests, with an emphasis on the Boston-based group named Bostonbullular. The group—one of many of its kind—is a collection of expats from Turkey that defines its agenda as standing up against violations of human rights and working toward a better, deeper democracy in Turkey. Unsurprisingly, like parallel post-Gezi groups in New York, London, and Berlin, they publically supported the pro-Kurdish party in the recent election.
As the urban protesters rose above ideological splits they became capable of uniting in demanding freedoms and rights for all.
The demographic diversity of protesters both within Turkey and beyond (like Bostonbullular) show precisely how successful the Gezi demonstrations were at connecting a geographically fragmented and politically divided resistance against the authoritarian government. By carrying democratic resistance from a specific contested urban site to national and international levels, the Gezi protesters achieved a spirit of connectivity unprecedented in recent Turkish history. While the organized resistance groups in the post-Gezi period have weakened in and out of Turkey, urban supporters of a deeper democracy continued to commit to the agendas of Gezi in their everyday lives.
The protesters’ ability to break free from ideological cages in the interest of forming new democratic alliances differentiated the Gezi protests from previous upheavals in Turkey. As the urban protesters rose above ideological splits—between the left, the right, the Islamist, the nationalist, the secularist and so on—they became capable of uniting in demanding freedoms and rights for all.
This is why Gezi at its peak was a remarkable experience. It will be remembered as a breaking point in Turkish history and a crucial precursor to this week’s national elections: in their objection to authoritarian rule, the protests cut across differences of class, ethnicity, sex and gender, and even the seemingly insurmountable barrier between the pious and the secular.
Importantly however, the Gezi demonstrations, rather than creating these practices from scratch, were essentially the crowning achievement and perhaps one of the most inspiring expressions of a new urbanism—a new politics of lifestyle—that had been in the making for years. Despite the widely shared belief that Gezi came out of the blue, it was a culmination of urban contestation in major Turkish cities, particularly in Istanbul.
However, as in the other post-uprising contexts, this victory was overshadowed by the great expectations of an immediate regime change. We often tend to measure the success of a protest by its immediate impact on a quick institutional fix. Yet, protests cannot be reduced to tool boxes of institutional repairs. Rather, they seek to address the grievances of ordinary people and give voice to their lived realities and demands. Although protests are regarded as intimidating by authoritarian leaders and often unruly even by democratic governments, they are relatively short lasting, because they cannot turn into a way of life in form—but they can make a lasting contribution to both social life and gradual political transformations.
The main challenge for Turkish democracy today is how to prioritize a united commitment to rights and freedoms over divisive ideological allegiances. This will be a test for the political elite in opposition to AKP, moving forward.
A related challenge is to nurture the overarching attitude of social inclusivity and political cooperation that the Gezi spirit achieved both in street protests and at the ballot box. This is the beginning of a long and arduous road toward a deeper democracy: In the aftermath of the elections we have yet to observe the capacities of the political elite in living up to the Gezi spirit as they contemplate forming alternative coalitions or minority governments.
Protests matter. But they do not matter because of their momentous rise, their tumultuous decline, or society’s great expectations from them. The central importance of protest lies not in what makes headlines, but in what makes an impact on the outlooks, practices, and lives of common people. Hence, the success of the Gezi protests is unlikely to be expressed in revolutionary changes. Gezi protests’ value lies in the degree to which its spirit continues to help Turkey come out of the legacy of ideological divides and to form new shifting alliances out of these old conflicts. We have yet to see to what extent our changing ways of live, and increasing capacities of inclusion and cooperation in everyday life will affect and transform actions of the political elite in the parliament.
Start reading Gaining Freedoms »
Berna Turam is Associate Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Northeastern University. Her books include Between Islam and the Stateand, most recently, Gaining Freedoms.
Comments