Last week, Turkish autocrat Recep Tayyip Erdogan ordered the arrest of his most prominent political rival, Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu. The subsequent protests have been widely characterised as the greatest unrest on Turkish streets for over a decade. What that actually means is that observers are comparing it to the demonstrations which erupted across the nation in May 2013, triggered in part by evidence of corruption around the commercial development of Gezi Park, one of Istanbul’s last public green spaces.
Classical liberals such as myself like to talk a lot about abstract principles, like freedom of speech; equality under the law; the independence of institutions. All of these things matter and all of these things are at stake in current confrontation in Turkey. Nor are they purely white and Western concerns.
It is two years since a 7.8 magnitude earthquake tore through South East Turkey, killing 50,000 people in Turkey and leaving millions homeless. Governments do not dictate the tremors of the earth. But they are responsible for the readiness of the emergency services; they are responsible for building infrastructure designed to withstand the risks of their nation’s climate.
What really lit the spark of protest, however, was the realisation that Turks had died in schools, hospitals and other public buildings because massive construction companies had routinely cut corners on earthquake safety codes – secure in their corrupt relationships with government officials.
It was not news to the Turkish people that Hatay, the city at the epicentre of the 2023 quake, was prone to earthquakes. What was news was that 20 years of public infrastructure, including the city’s only airport runway, had been built over its hotspots, and without basic earthquake proofing. Government corruption was no longer just the background noise of normal life; it was the reason thousands of people had died.
In nearby Serbia, a similar story is unfurling. In the major city of Novi Sad, 14 commuters were killed instantly when the concrete canopy of a train station collapsed last November; two more have since died in hospital, the most recent being a 19-year-old student.
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Read MoreLong-term leader Aleksandar Vučic, whose presidency has seen a shrinking of democratic freedoms, is now alternating between threatening and mocking protesters, who gathered again on 15 March for the largest protest ever seen in Serbia. One student told the BBC: “We just want a country that works”. To build that country, protesters are clear that they need a construction system based on accountability, not kickbacks.
As Patrick Cockburn wrote for this paper at the weekend, Trump’s fascist disdain for civil liberties in his own country “has set a new low bar for other world leaders”. He has also ended US funding for programmes supporting civic society and the defence of democratic institutions across Europe. America once claimed to promote democracy around the world; now it allies overtly with the world’s dictators.
Moments like this have global repercussions. America still claims to be the home of free speech. But each time an American president allows a autocrat to persecute critics on American soil, he gives further cover to do worse at home. This is how international norms erode.
In Turkey, however, dislodging Erdogan is still an unlikely dream. Even under his own rigged rules, he doesn’t face an election for another three years; he controls the institutions; he has jailed almost every possible opponent, including Osman Kavala, a liberal philanthropist whom Erdogan termed “the Red Soros”, taking a line from Trump and Viktor Orban’s vilification of the democracy funder George Soros. Already, Imamoglu’s CHP party has said it will shortly end its protests to free him.
Democratic values may sound like abstract things, but they can end up being the thing that stops a concrete canopy from falling on your head. In Turkey, Serbia and North Macedonia, this is the kind of functional democracy for which people are taking to the streets. Looking across the Atlantic from his own White House, however, Donald Trump is making their fight much harder.
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