Turkey is not having another Arab Spring, but something more democratic

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This weekend, Istanbul's central Taksim Square came to resemble Cairo's Tahrir Square at the peak of the Egyptian uprising: tear gas, fires, crowds denouncing the country's leader, running battles between police and protesters.

But this shouldn't be mistaken for a "Turkish spring." Turkey, in the midst of an economic boom and already robustly democratic, does not take lessons from the Arab countries to its south.

Rather than the Arab Spring creeping northward to Istanbul, this weekend's violence is best understood as a European protest – with its disaffected youth, its anger at tired old elected governments, its hunger for freedoms – transported eastward to Istanbul. Or as something distinctly Turkish.

It started quietly on Wednesday, with a few hundred protesters defending one of the city's few clusters of trees against bulldozers. City authorities planned to turn the park into what many believed would be a shopping mall (other officials said it would be a museum). And then the police responded brutally, as Turkish police so often do, hosing down the protesters with pepper spray and beating many of them into hospitalization. The whole world saw a photo of police pepper-spraying a young, un-headscarved woman in a red dress.

When Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan appearted on TV on Saturday, he outraged many moderate Turks with his dismissive tone. He defended the police violence and repeatedly denounced the protesters as "anti-democratic." He taunted the protesters as political lightweights: "Don't compete with us," he said, declaring that if the protesters brought 100,000 people to the square, his party would bring a million of its conservative supporters.

For many secular moderates who were becoming frustrated with the petty humiliations meted out by Mr. Erdogan's Peace and Justice Party (AKP) government – including last week's ban on alcohol sales between 10:00 pm and 6:00 am, this was the last straw.

As Tulin Daloglu wrote in the Middle East newsletter Al-Monitor, "[t]his protest likely spread to other cities because of police brutality and the AKP government's bad management. Period… Something as innocent as people demanding to preserve their park is becoming all out civil disobedience against the AKP rule. Thousands across the country are pouring onto the streets."

The Turkish media, oddly silent on the protests to this point, suddenly united in denunciation of Mr. Erdogan's hostile message. Even the Islamist dailies, which support his religious and socially conservative AKP, spoke out against him: "How can the political authority allow things to get to this point?," asked the normally staunchly pro-government newspaper Yeni Safak. "Why is it being stubborn? Why does it act so brutally and react so violently?"

At this point, the protests escalated into a wider anti-Erdogan action. This seemed to take many observers by surprise: After all, Mr. Erdogan has won three successive electoral victories, most recently with more than 50 per cent of the vote, and is popular enough that even some of his opponents have called him a successor to Kemal Ataturk, the father of modern Turkey.

But his behaviour has become increasingly alienating to those who aren't part of his religious-conservative circle of support: secularists unhappy with the alcohol ban, members of the Alevi minority angry that the third bridge over the Bosporous will be named after a Sultan who murdered their people en masse, and Kurds and their supporters unhappy with the pace and nature of peace talks with rebels.

"The apprehension has little to do with the economy," wrote Yavuz Baydar, a columnist with Today's Zaman. "The negative energy emanating from Syria has a partial impact. The jitters in public sentiment stem essentially from increasingly pronounced links between politics and religion, interventions in lifestyles and the demands of various social groups going unheeded."

This is not, despite the words of some protesters, a democratic revolution. But it is very much about democracy – about the fine grain of democracy, the gestures that shape a government between elections. As the Turkish writer Mustafa Akyol and the Arab scholar H.A. Hellyer wrote on Monday in a joint article for the Toronto-based Mideast site Tahrir Squared:

"The Arab uprisings were – and are – revolts against dictatorships that responded to protests with iron fists leading to hundreds, thousands, and even tens of thousands of deaths. Entire generations of Egyptians in Tahrir Square in 2011 had never known free and fair elections… While very different and much further along its democratic experiment as compared to Egypt, participatory democracy is sorely lacking in Turkey as well. Erdogan certainly enjoys electoral legitimacy – that cannot be doubted – but a disturbing pattern is emerging from his rule. He is becoming intolerant towards criticism, particularly from the media, and he has been increasingly rejectionist of any participation from other camps for major political decisions."

Mr. Erdogan is likely correct that he could create his own rallies of hijab-wearing, non-drinking AKP supporters that would be even larger in number. But that misses the point: In doing so, he is polarizing a Turkish society that he began his prime ministership, a dozen years ago, trying to unite.

"Erdogan seems genuinely to believe that mass protests have no place in a country administered by a strong, stable, and economically successful government," writes Sinan Ulgen, the head of Istanbul think tank EDAM. "He emphasizes the ballot box as the venue for social and political stakeholders to show their disaffection with the government… But with its maturing and increasingly pluralistic civil society, Turkey has moved beyond this more limited definition of democratic freedoms. The Turkish political leadership, including the parliamentary opposition, have to readjust their outlook. Otherwise with the newly found sense of empowerment of its citizenry, public turbulence in Turkey will become much more common."