Erdogan shows democracy is not just about elections

Anna Sonny, 14 June 2013

Last month, protests in Istanbul that started off as an environmentalist movement against government plans to build a shopping mall in a park erupted into nationwide anti-government protests after Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s disproportionately heavy-handed response resulted in at least 4 deaths and 5,000 injuries.

The protests spread to 40 of Turkey’s cities and has been called the biggest political crisis of Erdogan’s rule. The movement doesn’t quite match the Arab Spring that rippled across North Africa a few years ago; Erdogan has been re-elected twice, whereas the Arab Spring nations had never experienced a democratically elected administration. Respect for human rights, however, of which Erdogan’s government has shown little, is the core theme of these protests.

The Turkey protests are reactionary rather than revolutionary; a bubbling over of resentment towards Erdogan’s authoritarian rule and his intimidation of the media and opposition. The large numbers of women and young people in the protests have been noted by the international press, as well as the impossibility of classifying the movement as purely religious; the protesters include both the devout and the secularists and they are speaking out against a range of issues, from restrictions on the sale of alcohol to the high number of journalists in prison.

So far, Erdogan has held talks with the protesters, who are refusing to leave the park until the redevelopment plans are scrapped. But the Prime Minister has already shown his true autocratic colours and it seems unlikely that they will budge; the government’s brutal force only served to prove the need for the protests in the first place.

The EU has condemned the Turkish government’s reaction in a non-binding resolution and is now split over resuming Turkey’s accession to the 27-nation bloc. Turkey’s marathon EU entry remains incomplete, despite starting in 2005.  Some MEPs are hoping that speeding up accession talks might nudge Erdogan into cleaning up his record on human rights but it remains to be seen whether this will have any effect ; negotiations stalled in 2010, with talks being held in 13 policy areas but only one being completed.

In testament to the Turkish media’s submission to the Prime Minister, most TV stations didn’t even broadcast the protests as they were happening, even outside their offices; it was Twitter and other social media that spread news. Erdogan has done much for his country, especially economically; Turkey’s GDP per person has tripled in the past ten years. Erdogan may see himself as untouchable, but as these recent events have shown, he has not quite understood that true democracy cannot exist without respect for human rights. As Turkey’s President Abdullah Gül has said, democracy is not just about elections.