Quick takes // By Ben FrankelTurmoil in Turkey is about the future identity of the country

Demonstrations in Turkey continue // Source: youtube.com

The demonstrations in Istanbul began as a neighborhood protest against the government’s plan to build a shopping mall on the site of a popular park. Soon, however, the demonstrations spread to other cities, and spokespeople for the demonstrators emphasized that the park issue was symbolic, and that it stood for deeper issues.

These deeper issues have to do with what many in Turkey’s educated, secular classes view as the heavy-handedness of the Erdogan government.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Islamic party has won three elections in a row, each with a larger majority than the previous one. The government has used its increasing majorities in parliament, the clever use of referenda, to change the balance of power in Turkey. The power of the military and the courts, the two pillars of the post-Ottoman republic created in 1923 by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, has been severely restricted, and the power of parliament, where the Islamists have held sway since 2002, increased.

Erdogan used his growing power to advance three main goals, two domestic and one in foreign policy:

• Opening Turkey’s public sphere and educational institutions to Islamic ideas and preferences, something not allowed during the Kemalite republic.
• Using government contracts and big construction projects – like the planned shopping mall on the site of the park in Istanbul – to foster the emergence of a new economic and business elite. This new elite is based on Black Turks — entrepreneurs who moved from Anatolia and other parts of Turkey’s hinterland to the big cities to avail themselves of the Islamic governments’ generous contracts. Erdogan’s goal has been to create a business elite beholden to his party, an elite which would challenge the urban White Turks business elite which has dominated Turkey’s business life for decades. This White Turk elite had been the third pillar of the Kemalite republic.
• Establishing Turkey as one of the leaders of the Sunni-Muslim Arab world by championing the Palestinian cause, aligning Turkey closely with the Arab Spring wave, and supporting the Sunni anti-Assad rebels in Syria.

There is little doubt that Erdogan and his party still enjoy broad popular support in Turkey. There is also little doubt, though, that the three successive victories have made Erdogan and his party over-confident, if not arrogant.