A week on. Another night of rioting across Turkey. Some 67 towns and cities affected so far. And a minor, peaceful protest against an Istanbul planning decision – the demolition of part of one of the last city centre parks to make way for a shopping centre, mosque and a replica of an old military barracks – is turning into a fundamental challenge to Turkey's neo-Islamist government and the decade-long rule of increasingly autocratic prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Yesterday the 240,000-strong Public Workers Unions’ Confederation (KESK) joined in, beginning a two-day “warning strike” to protest at the brutal police crackdown. As he set off for an official visit to north Africa on Monday a blasé Erdogan claimed the protesters were “arm-in-arm with terrorism”.
“In a few days the situation will return to normal.” Perhaps not. At stake now is much more than a shopping centre. Erdogan’s political project to turn Turkey from a parliamentary to a presidential system, with, it is believed, himself at the helm, must be called into question. And, for many in the west, its status as a reconciler of Islam and secular democracy is looking tarnished.
Turkey will hold its first public vote for the presidency next year and there is speculation Erdogan will stand. Parliamentary elections are due the year after. And while the protests may not unseat his popular Justice and Development party (AKP) – it faces no well-organised opposition – they may yet force a reappraisal of some of its cherished constitutional projects, which require backing from at least one other group in the legislature .
Erdogan has become the issue: his party is increasingly a personal vehicle for him, while the protests have explicitly focused their anger on him. Secularists complain of a hidden Islamist agenda: there have been crackdowns on alcohol sales and warnings about public displays of male-female affection. Civil liberties activists complain of the muzzling of dissent and an increasingly compliant media. Minorities, such as the Kurds, bridle at continuing restrictions.
Middle class Istanbul views the breakneck development of the city and influx of newly rich “peasants” from Anatolia, the base of the AKP, as threatening the city’s character. Even the proposed naming of a third Bosphorus bridge after the 16th-century Yavuz Sultan Selim – “Sultan the Grim” who was known for a massacre of the Alevi minority – has raised hackles. A historian at Bogazici University in Istanbul, Edhem Eldem, criticises the government for undertaking its development projects without consultation. “In a sense, they are drunk with power,” he argues. “They lost their democratic reflexes and are returning to what is the essence of Turkish politics: authoritarianism.”