Gezi anniversary reminder of Erdogan's nine lives
The one-year anniversary of the Gezi Park protests is another reminder of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's durability despite a series of crises.
Turkey is bracing for the first anniversary of the demonstrations that started as a simple protest to save trees in Gezi Park, near Istanbul’s Taksim Square, and ended up convulsing the country after the government’s heavy-handedness toward the protesters.
Many in and outside of Turkey saw the demonstrations as Turkey’s version of the Arab Spring, hoping it would bring down the country’s increasingly authoritarian and bellicose Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
The international media trained its live cameras on Istanbul for days — much to the annoyance of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) — while many Western commentators barely concealed their hope that this was the beginning of the end for the overtly anti-Western Erdogan.
Also attracting attention in the West was the middle-class nature of the “uprising,” which was driven by educated youth from the secular urban elite and supported by an older generation coming out nightly to clang pots and pans to protest Erdogan and the AKP. A year later, one has to ask what all this led to.
