Turkish journalists have become victims of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s hard-line reactions to the Gezi Park resistance that erupted as a societal explosion after the May 31 police intervention and that spread to the whole country. Erdogan chose to see the Gezi Park movement — which has lost its scope and intensity of the June events but whose effects and ramifications will continue — as an international plot spearheaded by the “high interest-rate lobby” that seeks to topple him.
The prime minister built his policy on an approach that criminalized the Gezi opposition. He tried to unite his followers around himself by sticking to this narrative and with it he silenced some critical voices from inside his party. Erdogan must have thought that his polarization policy based on charges of an “international plot” had provided him with an opportunity to exert even more pressure on journalists — hence the expanding of already substantive press freedom gap in the country.
