On Sunday, June 9, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan delivered five speeches in three different provinces. His first speech was at Adana and Mersin in the south. Following his return to Ankara he delivered three more speeches to cheering crowds out to welcome him, starting from the airport.

While everyone was expecting him to tone down the more he spoke, he actually hardened his language. In his last speech to the crowd in front of a shopping mall in Ankara he openly challenged the protesters: "If you continue in the same vein, excuse me, but I will have to talk to you in the language you understand. Patience has its limits. You can’t show this country to the entire world as a country where terror reigns.”

Information leaking out from a meeting of the central executive council of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) on Saturday in Istanbul clearly enunciated how Erdogan perceives all that has been happening. We know that in the meeting Erdogan underlined three points as causes of events. According to the prime minister, the causes of the street protests and clashes that have shaken Turkey for two weeks are:

1. Solution process to the Kurdish issue: Those afraid of a solution to the Kurdish issue are provoking the streets.
2. Interest lobby: When the government pushed the interest rates below 5%, those quarters profiting from interest rates got scared and they opted for provocations against the government.
3. Powers that cannot accept Turkey becoming an international power are also provoking from within Turkey.

Even those who have the most superficial knowledge about Turkey’s political life will easily recognize that Erdogan’s approach to analysis of the events is a classical state formulation. The military who ruled Turkey for many years also used to explain all demands for identity and social tensions as machinations of Turkey’s internal and external enemies. Today we see that Erdogan is using precisely the same language of the military regime that he defeated.