Turkey’s Gezi Protests: A Turning Point, but Towards What?

The historical import of the Gezi Protests, which shook Turkey in the summer of 2013, can hardly be questioned. The protests were a remarkable demonstration of public dissent: upwards of three million people participated directly, and protests were seen in nearly all of Turkey’s 81 provinces. The Turkish government responded with mass arrests and rampant use of police violence, thousands of protestors were injured, many seriously; eleven were killed. The use of tear gas was so extensive that street dogs died of suffocation from its overuse. The Gezi Protests remain a potent focus of popular memory in Turkey. Participants typically remember it as a glorious moment of resistance and exhilarating demonstration of their own freedom. For the government, with little evidence, the Gezi protests remain evidence of outside interference to bring down the ruling Justice and Development Party; the purported leaders of the protests have been prosecuted and jailed on trumped up charges. Scholarly production on Gezi, whether it focuses on causes, mobilization, or strategies, has largely been colored by a marked romanticism. Many volumes have been dedicated to the protests; the vast majority have framed them in heroic terms, a valiant moment of resistance to the Erdogan government’s rapacious transformation of public spaces and consolidation of control over Turkey’s public life. At a fundamental level, I am in sympathy with this reading of events: certainly there was much that was heroic about the efforts at peaceful resistance evident in the Gezi protests and in the protestors’ vision of a more tolerant and multi-vocal politics. Yet, this paper argues, the romanticism evident in the scholarship fundamentally distracts from a more basic and important component of the Gezi Protests’ role in Turkish political history: they marked a disastrous acceleration of both Erdogan’s consolidation of personal control of the government and of the "authoritarian slide" that has so marked Turkey ever since. Over the course of the protests, and in their wake, more moderate leaders within the AKP were shunted to the sidelines and Erdogan emerged, no longer as "first among equals," but as the sole significant leader of his party. Policing measures aimed at suppression of protests were honed and, in the intervening decade, no significant mass protest has developed outside of Kurdish majority regions anywhere in Turkey. The Gezi Protests were arguably heroic; they were also in a fundamental sense, a disastrous failure.