‘Teflon Tayyip’ has bounced back to win the Turkish presidency but a new leftist party may be the success story of the election They call him “Teflon Tayyip”. The man who can face down the challenge of Gezi Park, where 11 protesters were killed and 8,000 injured, and tell the world that they’re drunks and terrorists. The man who can tell [...] → Read the full article…
In the run-up to Turkey’s municipal elections on March 30, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan declared that the popular vote would serve as a referendum on his scandal-plagued leadership. With the help of his Justice and Development Party (AKP), which centered its campaigning on him, Erdoğan was able to redefine the elections. His opponents blindly played along, hoping that the [...] → Read the full article…
Not just the mobilizational power but also the spirit of Gezi pervades objections to electoral manipulation, defying the AKP’s attempts to snuff it out. The wickedly humorous wit and creativity used to critique the AKP’s brutal police crackdowns that drove millions of people to the streets during the height of the Gezi protests in 2013 are being deployed in full force to [...] → Read the full article…
On March 30th the prime minister’s support among Turkish voters will be put to the test, for the first time since the Gezi protests and the corruption probe, in municipal elections. Mr Erdogan has explicitly turned these into a referendum on himself and his party. If AKP does well, which most analysts reckon means winning over 40% of the vote and [...] → Read the full article…
Berkin Elvan’s funeral services, which were held at the Okmeydani Cemevi on 12 March, once again raised the question of why all six youths killed during the Gezi Protests—or, if we are to approach the Gezi process within a broader framework, why seven out of eight youths killed—were Alevîs. Indeed, the question is not a new one; months prior to [...] → Read the full article…
1. Erdogan’s pretext for shutting down Twitter is the existence of two accounts he claims are slanderous, which have been linking to allegedly fake recordings that show him as corrupt. This is not the first time a government has threatened, or acted, to shut down Twitter when faced with political opposition. When Mubarak did it he was overthrown shortly afterwards. Erdogan enjoys [...] → Read the full article…
Media in the hands of citizens can rattle regimes. It makes it much harder for rulers to maintain legitimacy by controlling the public sphere. But activists, who have made such effective use of technology to rally supporters, still need to figure out how to convert that energy into greater impact. LAST Wednesday, more than 100,000 people showed up in Istanbul [...] → Read the full article…
Erdoğan’s strategy since Gezi has been to polarize the electorate, disowning those who speak against him and trumpeting his role as a fighter for those who support the party. But his indifference to Elvan’s fate exhibited cruelty rather than strength. On Tuesday, a fifteen-year-old Turkish Alevi named Berkin Elvan died, sparking the country’s largest anti-government protests since last summer, when [...] → Read the full article…
Riot police and hundreds of protesters clashed on Tuesday after a teenager boy died from wounds he had received during an anti-government demonstration last year. The chaos escalated hours after it was announced that 15-year-old Berkin Elvan had died in an Istanbul hospital. Berkin’s family said he was on his way to a shop to buy bread when he was caught [...] → Read the full article…
The families of those who lost their lives in the police crackdowns during the Gezi Park protests and those who were injured during the protests announced the establishment of a shared association on Jan. 21. The “Gezi Martyrs and Wounded Platform” was formally established following a meeting at the Istanbul Bar Association. The attendance of the elder brother of Mehmet [...] → Read the full article…