The intervention of police at Taksim Square on Tuesday (June 11) is nothing less than "Old Turkey" — highly intolerant, equipped with hard-liner patterns and unwilling to engage in negotiation-based solutions — being put on full display before the domestic and international public. If this kind of hard line continues, it will bring out the worst in social groups and strata not supportive of the AKP, and only chase away the hopes of a national reconciliation.

The public messages that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan delivered in a spree of speeches over the protest wave that Gezi Park triggered indicate how he has updated his policies.

He intends to spread nationwide his political struggle against this social eruption, which comes in the wraps of environmentalism, urban planning, citizen inclusion in decision-making, opposition to paternalistic rhetoric and tutelage, moral diversity, minority-majority lifestyle relations, corruption concerns, decentralization, the self-assertion of a new generation and defense of public space.

The update, which the prime minister seems to have shaped on his own, signals that from now on he will openly build his policies on a strategy of escalation and tactics of intimidation against select targets. His main targets so far are “the interest-rate lobby” and “global focal points of enmity” — groups or concepts that are hard to define. This is a skillfully chosen method: If the prime minister emerges successful, he will have defeated those evil forces; if not, he will have room to nourish polarization via electoral bases.