Turkey’s Democratic Growing Pains
The Gezi Park protests may in the end serve to strengthen Turkish democracy.
The protests across the country are not ending, but changing form.
People are gathering at parks at nights in Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir and possibly in other cities, and discussingturning their protest against Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s authoritarian instincts in governing the country into something politically constructive.
There are so far no answers on how, or what to do next, but these gatherings resemble the origins of democracy in the ancient Greece as explained by Aristotle in his book “Politics”: “It’s necessary for the citizens to be of such a number that they knew each other’s personal qualities and thus can elect their officials and judge their fellows in a court of law sensibly,” he wrote.
When these people poured into the streets across the country in reaction to the police’s excessive use of force against a small group of protesters trying to save a dozen trees in downtown Istanbul, they had no inkling about each other. Although Erdogan claims 76% of them to belong to the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), these people were not politically oriented or unified — except that they were united against Erdogan’s policies.
