How wide must a protest movement spread before it becomes a rebellion? How far until it becomes a global movement?
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.
Yet to understand how Turkey got here, and what Erdogan’s current challenges mean for the global network of other strongmen buoyed by the Presidency of Donald Trump, it is worth looking at more recent protests, both in Turkey and across its Southern European neighbours in the Balkans.
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.
Ask any protester in Istanbul this week what they believe, and you may well find yourself listening to a theory of government as sophisticated as that of any lecturer at the Sorbonne. But nothing propels protesters out onto the streets – not here in the UK, not in Turkey, not anywhere else – like the discovery that a government has failed to keep ordinary families safe, doing ordinary activities, in ordinary buildings.
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.
The weeks following the earthquake were defined by stories of relatives forced to watch their loved ones slowly die under the rubble, as government help failed to arrive. Thousands died with their legs trapped or crushed under debris, able to beg their relatives for help but incapable of being dug free due to lack of trained staff. In the ensuing protests, mourners would chant, “can anybody hear my voice?”, a reference to the cries of the dying. Erdogan had systematically shrunk the budget of the nation’s Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency (the AFAD).
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.
The erosion of proper building regulation went right back to Ergodan’s earliest rise to power on the wind of donations from the construction sector. As Gonul Tol, author of Erdogan’s War: A Strongman’s Struggle at Home and in Syria, wrote at the time: “He enriched a small circle of close associates from the construction sector by awarding them infrastructure projects without competitive tenders or proper regulatory oversight.”
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.
Government negligence, allegedly inspired by corruption, has also been the focus of protests sweeping across southern and eastern Europe this year. In North Macedonia protests are continuing after a nightclub fire killed 59 people in the eastern town of Kočani, blamed on corruption which allowed it to operate with an illegally obtained licence and in breach of basic safety regulations.
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.
Protesters claim that corruption led to underinvestment in safety standards during a recent renovation, and that the government knew the building was unsafe when they hailed its reopening.
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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.
Across Turkey and the Balkans, there is a new mood of resistance to the corruption endemic to mafia states. It’s also detectable in the organised opposition slowly returning to Hungary and Slovakia, as protests gather against leaders thought to be in the pocket of Russian interests. Yet there is a fundamental obstacle to the democratic movement in Europe.
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.
Trump sympathises with Erdogan on how to treat dissidents. When Erdogan visited the Trump White House in January 2019, several of his bodyguards attacked a peaceful protest in Washington DC and beat up critics of their boss’s visit. Despite video evidence showing the unprovoked assault, charges against the bodyguards were dropped.
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.
It may turn out that the people of Turkey, Serbia and North Macedonia don’t need America to uphold their democracies for them. The current protest leaders are doing a far better job of confronting their Presidents than any Democrat in America. In Serbia, the protesters have even taken on Trump directly, rallying against a government property deal with his son-in-law Jared Kusher.
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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