This episode explores the broad implications of the large-scale protests across Turkey in response to President Erdoğan’s repression of political opposition. What is the background to the recent developments that the Turkish regime faces? And what are the dilemmas that have given rise to this political storm? Listen to hear why the current resistance in the streets to authoritarianism is a sign that young people and ordinary citizens are willing to protect democracy.
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• Our guest: Soli Özel
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Shalini Randeria (SR): Welcome to a new episode of Democracy and Question, the podcast series that explores the challenges democracies are facing around the world. I'm Shalini Randeria, Rector and President of Central European University in Vienna, and senior fellow at the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at the Graduate Institute in Geneva.
This is the fifth episode of season 10 of Democracy in Question. I'm really pleased to welcome today Soli Özel, a prominent Turkish political scientist and a public intellectual. Soli teaches in the International Relations Department of Kadir Has University in Istanbul since 2010. He's also taught at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies at Northwestern University and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem to name but a few of the universities at which he has taught over the years.
He wrote a daily column on international relations in the newspaper Sabah until it was seized by the Turkish regime in 2007 and was then foreign news director of Gazeta Habertürk daily, launched in 2009. He also served as editor-in-chief of the Turkish edition of Foreign Policy and has been contributing to Project Syndicate on Turkish politics. Currently, Soli is a fellow at the Institute of Human Sciences, the IWM here in Vienna, working on a project titled “Tracking the Making of a New World Order and Europe's Place in It”[i]. Soli has published widely on topics such as Turkish geopolitical strategies and the worldwide populist authoritarian turn.
He's uniquely positioned to comment on the broader implications of the ongoing massive protests all over Turkey against President Erdogan's authoritarian moves over the past weeks. On March 29, Istanbul saw a rally of one and a half to two million people, the largest ever public protest in recent memory. Despite the banning of rallies, demonstrations took place in most large cities across the country with over a million people out in the streets every day, including in areas that traditionally have voted for the ruling party, the AKP. Over 2000 people have so far been arrested, including foreign journalists. The main trigger for this remarkable street mobilization was the detention of Istanbul's Mayor Ekrem İmammoğlu on corruption charges. He was slated to be nominated as the CHPs future candidate in the Turkish presidential elections to be held in 2028. The fallout from the government's move to cement its power is now threatening to brew into a perfect political storm.
I will discuss with Soli some of the background to these recent developments along with the dilemmas that the Turkish regime as much as the opposition now faces. I'll ask him to reflect on what these mean for the future of democratic politics beyond the holding of regular elections in Turkey. We'll also explore some of the geopolitical implications of the turmoil in the Middle East and Turkey's relationship with the European Union and the U.S.A.
Soli, welcome to the podcast. It's a real pleasure to have you as my guest and thank you very much for joining me today.
Soli Özel (SÖ): Oh, it's my pleasure to be here. Thank you very much for inviting me, and I think we'll have a rather exciting conversation.
SR: Let's begin by discussing the rather surprising timing and the reasons for this full-fledged repression of political opposition in Turkey, which have led to these massive ongoing large-scale protests. The next presidential election is in 2028, so why arrest the opposition party's future presidential candidate?His party, the CHP has been winning municipal elections of late, but the party doesn't seem to have been at the forefront of any really strong opposition to the policies of the Erdogan government. So, what role does the Istanbul mayor and his party play that is suddenly perceived by the government as such a major threat to the president's power?
SÖ: First of all, the mayor of Istanbul who is now in jail and, therefore, no longer the mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoglu, was the one person whohasgiven the president of Turkey Taip Erdogan continuously defeats in elections. In 2009, he ran as a relatively unknown candidate of the opposition party and won by 13,000 votes out of about eight million. Then the higher electoral council decided that of the four ballots we put in an envelope, one was definitely not valid, and that was the one for the mayor's election. So,then we held another election for the mayor. And this time Mr. Imamoglu won by 806,000 votes. It was quite a landslide. And in 2024 as well he won by 54 percent of the vote. Between 2019 and 2024, his name was always upfront for being the candidate of the opposition for presidential elections.
He was of course, the mayor of Istanbul; Istanbul,having about 16 to 18 million population, producing about 33-34 percent of Turkey’s income, paying most of the taxes, a major tourist attraction. Obviously, it's the center of business and tourism in the country. Istanbul's mayor runs basically a small country. And Ekrem Imamoglu therefore continued to be a threat to Erdogan. His desire to run for the presidency was obvious to everyone, and there were always efforts to block his way.
That he was a threat is well known. And your question is, of course, very valid. Why (jail him) now when the elections are not going to be held until 2028 I think one immediate reason as to why the timing can be explained is that on the 23rd of March, the CHP decided to hold a primary to determine who the presidential candidate for 2028 was going to be. And for the first time ever, that decision of voting for determining the candidate was open to the membership, to the entire membership of the party. And I suspect that along with other reasons that I'll try to touch upon the government decided that if Imamoglu received an overwhelming majority of the votes and then he was declared the candidate for the presidency, there would be an incredible momentum and it was best not to give him that chance.
SR: Let me try to understand the background a bit better here. The jailed Istanbul mayor’s party the CHP, Republican People’s Party, has had a meandering trajectory. It moved from a Turkish nationalist party towards the left in the 1960s and ‘70s, then it was banned under the military junta in the 1980s and then turned into a more reactionary, nationalist, and even anti-Kurdish force after 1992. Now the party seems to be in a rather uncomfortable position due to its early quietist stance, when it didn’t protest the government’s policies. It simply hoped that the ruling party’s growing unpopularity would be enough to help the CHP win power eventually. So, is the CHP simply going along with the ongoing protests or has it now begun to lead them? Its response to the latest developments and the massive protests has also however contained a brilliant move to open its own party primaries not just to its party members, but to all citizens of Turkey to vote for their preferred presidential candidate. And I believe you have cast your own ballot in this too. Could you explain this somewhat surprising turn of events?
SÖ: First of all, the Social Democratic wing of Turkey's politics was represented by another party that was founded after the coup of 1980 because CHP itself was banned until 1987. And the CHP was the minority party. The SHP, Social Democratic People's Party, was really the main body, but then they joined forces, I think in 1995. And the CHP came back to life and under the leadership of Mr. Deniz Baykal. And in my estimation, the party basically did not engage in politics, meaning it was scared of supporting street action when there were thingsthat would not be acceptable in a democratic system. Particularly under Mr. Kilicdarogluit helped criminalize legitimate protest movements. The street was off bounds and Mr. Kilicdaroglu was probably one of the most unimaginative political leaders that you could find and he lost every election that he has contested. And the only winning decision he has made was actually to run Mr. Imamoglu as the candidate for mayor of Istanbul back in 2019. He blocked any alternative candidates in 2023 and presented himself as the candidate for presidency. He lost that one as well, and therefore, dashed the hopes of about 48 percent of the public that has consistently opposed Mr. Erdogan's rule for different reasons in different times. And that really demoralized the public. That's why he lost the presidency of his party. And the party was revitalizedto a large extent under new and younger leadership, which took its inspiration from Mr. Imamoglu as well.
Now I must say I did not expect the CHP to actually rise to this occasion. But these are the tricks that history plays on us most often actually, whereby, yes, institutions and personalities may actually be recreated or rejuvenated by extraordinary historical moments.
And that is, I think, exactly what happened. The CHP of course was responding to a social movement that was triggered by several consecutive things because the first move by the government was to annul the college degree of Mr. Imamoglu. That's one of the conditions of eligibility for the presidency. And in fact, the events began after the day his diploma was annulled, and the next day he was taken under custody as if he was a criminal terrorist.In fact, he was accused of being that, in fact those charges were dropped later. But that then led students in Istanbul University, where Mr. Imamoglu did receive his degree to start the protest. The police came and the police were pushed back. And then the rest is what you have described that is like a wildfire. The social protest movement actually extended to the rest of the country. Even very conservative provinces and even villagers protested because any thinking person would know that this was not a judicial process, this was totally politically motivated and the motivation was let's block a very potent candidate that might actually become our rival in the next elections.
Because it was so transparent the reaction was swift. The Turkish public, whatever their understanding of democracy, or their practice of democracy might be, believes that the ballot box is sacrosanct and that is where the will of the people really gets reflected. And this has also been Mr. Erdogan’s strongest point that he was always elected. Now, the elections lately were not necessarily very fair or very free maybe, but still the legitimacy of the ruling party and the president really came from the fact that they won at the ballot box. Now, to block that for a candidate meant that the elections were not going to be fair. And obviously probably not free either. And meddling with what the elector considers to be sacrosanct, the ballot box, really brought the reaction. And both the party and its leader then owned that movement and began to manage it. They did not instigate it,but they were a part of that. And when the movement came about, they actually managed it pretty well.
SR: The last time I covered Turkish elections in this podcast, it was the presidential election of 2023. Contrary to many predictions at the time, Erdogan managed to get re-elected, but with a relatively narrow margin. His party overcame the challenge of very high inflation at that time by handing out targeted benefits to supporters. But he also managed to shift public discourse from an ailing economy for which his government’s policies were responsible to the perceived threat to Turkish national security. And he thus managed to rouse patriotic nationalist sentiments to cement his power. However, his government has done little in the interim to alleviate the cost-of-living crisis for millions of ordinary citizens; the currency has been in free fall.
Interestingly, students are at the forefront of the recent mass protests in Istanbul that were triggered due to the cancellation of the Istanbul mayor’s diploma by the university in a move to disqualify his future candidature in the presidential elections. But the large rallies against the government are also taking place in relatively conservative parts of the country as well as in rural areas. Do you think that the mayor’s arrest the was just merely a spark which ignited a popular anger fueled actually by widespread but simmering economic discontent? Or is this reading too much into a movement which is simply converging around the person of Istanbul’s mayor Mr. Imamoglu? He has been winning elections by speaking out courageously against the stifling of dissent and opposition in Turkey. He published, for example, a passionate plea recently in the New York Times calling on Western politicians to give up the realpolitik of appeasement and asking them to no longer turn a blind eye to the dismantling of democracy in his country. So, could it be that he has become a unifying figure for a much broader political and social coalition, which would push forward for a democratization of Turkey?
SÖ: First of all, in all such movements and their political consequenceswe will not know exactly what triggered what. But there is no doubt that accumulated grievances, economic grievances, social grievances, cultural grievances, political grievances, they all added up. You never know what will be the spark of social explosion or a social protest movement. In this particular time, they all converged and the annulment of the diploma in what was obviously a political process,finally led to this protest and resistance.
Why the students? Because poll after poll suggest that nearly 65 to 70 percent of the youth in the country would like to go and live abroad. That's a very high percentage. Particularly the educated youth of the country, the human capital of the country, is really the most important wealth that it has. To lose its educated people or to have its educated new elites to want to live abroad is a big problem. And when all hope is crushed, then you have no other option but to protest and protest more loudly.There is a recognition that exit may not be the solution and that maybe it's time to actually try voice.
You are right that Imamoglu has become a symbol of that protest. One important reason for that was he did not bow, he remained defiant. He continues to be defiant, even in jail. In fact, at some point they tried to take his telephone and close his social media accounts, and I think they have put some restrictions on his personal wealth. So, he began to symbolize something bigger than he himself as a person.If I'm correct, and if the ballot box is so sacrosanct, then to push the mayor elected by 54 percent of the citizens out, was not to be acceptable.
Imamoglu has always had good relations with conservatives, with Kurds. In fact, one of the problems for the ruling party was that Imamoglu managed to actually forge coalitions with the Kurds. So, he brought about a much larger, much wider coalition, which used to be the big success of Erdogan’s party. That's why I think he also had resonance in Anatolya politically too. Andas you said, he did not choose appeasement either. He's been defiant and that is also part of his appeal. There are many differences between CHP now and before. And I think leadership is a critical element in that. Now a consolidated view of Imamoglu maybe the Mayor of Ankara, is that these guys are actually capable of running the country as well, which was not the case prior to them appearing on the scene as powerful and very competent managers of major cities.
SR: Soli, let’s turn more generally to the authoritarian toolkit, which President Erdogan has put in place slowly but systematically over the years. And let’s discuss some of the similarities in the tactics of such authoritarian leaders worldwide. This is not the first time that the Turkish president has faced challenges to the consolidation of his hegemonic rule. He began by packing courts with loyalists, thus turning the judiciary into an instrument that could be deployed against his political rivals and opponents whenever he needed that. After that he embarked on the constitutional strengthening and concentration of presidential power, which led to the widespread politicization also of the bureaucracy. He then increased his control over universities by unilaterally appointing university presidents. We've seen all of this happening, for example, under Viktor Orban in Hungary, too. There as in Turkey state controlled, loyalist media and the authorities that regulate social media have also played their part in repressing protests and supporting the government. For example, the telecommunication agency in Turkey even restricted social media access without a court ruling. So, could you talk a little bit about this particular kind of authoritarian toolkit from which now President Trump seems to be also borrowing some strategies as well?
SÖ: Well, I mean, the handbook has been collectively written in the course of the last, say, 25 years. I would start this with Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, quite frankly. And then a number of people contributed. And as you suggest Turkish practices had also inspired other political leaders. And now they seem to inspire Donald Trump as well. Politicians during the Cold War suggested to the public that they would make Turkey the Little America. And the joke in Turkey today is that America has become the large Turkey. Or the distance between Turkey and the rest of the democratic world has actually shrunk. This is precisely why I think the success of this mobilization, especially if we can now reopen our political system, is going to have an impact outside the borders of Turkey as well. It's one thing to look at the pressures and authoritarian practices, but I think it is also important to look at resistance, how that resistance manifests itself, what ways it finds for manifesting itself, and whether or not it'll have a chance.
The women's movement was, has been consistently the most militant resistor every yearon the eighth of March, onPride Day, they're all out there. And I thinkthis kind of resistance to increasingly repressive patriarchy is also common among the educated children of the conservative families as well. Now we have two countries in which social movements are fairly robust, much longer in Serbia and shorter in Turkey, but still long enough. And those are important moments, especially if we're going to be discussing the future of democratic rule in the world.
SR: You're making a very interesting point here about the fact that we have had pro-democracy movements, protests against authoritarian rule and for freedom in various parts of the world.In Hong Kong it was also led by students and young people but was stifled quickly with a strong hand and under pressure from the Chinese government. We saw massive protests in Iran that were led by women, which were brutally repressed as I discussed in an earlier podcast a month ago[ii]. The ongoing Serbian movement against corruption and for democracy that is also led by students will be the subject of my podcast next fortnight. So, the question in this context is whether and under what conditions could this current mobilization in Turkey become a force for democratization, not only in your country, but also in the region? Or is Erdogan’s regime cynically playing a long game, waiting for this wave of protests to subside well before the elections take place in three years’ time?
SÖ: To start with what your observation aboutthe failure of most of those social movements, including the Arab revolts, the Gezi Park in Turkey and all that was that they deliberately did not have leadership and they deliberately did not want to be political. And in the Turkish case, political parties did not own up to that mobilization.The big difference today is that now in Turkey the CHP because of the circumstances, responds to the social demand and channels that energy into a political process. We're just at the beginning, whether they'll be able to manage it as wisely as they have so far is yet unknown. And you're absolutely right that such movements cannot continue forever with the same zeal. Unavoidably, they are liable to fizzle out. Your guess is as good as mine as to what will happen in the next few weeks. You mentioned 2000 protestors were in custody.I think cases have opened against them and I think the prosecutors want three years (imprisonment) for them and banning from politics. Where that will go remains to be seen.
But I think the government, because it was not expecting such a huge and very energetic negative response did actually take some steps back. We have some information that the original plan also included appointing a tutor to replace Mr. Imamoglu. That had been done to many municipalities, particularly in the South-East, but also in the course of the last three, four months in different municipalities in Istanbul and elsewhere. And they were thinking of appointing a tutor to head the CHP because of alleged irregularities in their party convention back in 2023, which changed the leadership. The information we have is the market reaction both domestically and abroad was fierce. The Turkish central bank seems to have burned 40 billion to keep the currency stable. So, at least for the moment those particular steps were not taken. And the opposition party in order to avoid charges of misconduct, held another convention on the sixth of April. And re-elected the chairman. And his list has won all party positions, posts. So, this is still a situation that is evolving.
I'm sure the government has a strategy to make sure that this fizzles out, or at least the intensity of it is drastically reduced. And the opposition too, I suppose, would like to keep hope alive, obviously, but would also like to keep the energy alive. You cannot really go on doing this every day. But weekly rallies, not just in Istanbul, but across the countrybasically bring the issues that hurt people back to the people.
It is an evolving situation. We will see what kind of strategies will be mobilized, will be devised, by both Mr. Erdogan and the ruling coalition and the opposition. I hope that it doesn't evolve in a harsh direction. And maybe it'll actually open up the political space, in order to regain its democratic credentials.
SR: That’s an interesting point. The arrests and the protests have really spooked the markets and triggered a run on the Turkish currency. The lira lost 10 percent of its value within a matter of hours. And you've explained to us how much of the foreign exchange reserves were used up by the Central Bank to prop up the lira in just a few days. What it shows is how vulnerable the country's political economy is to reactions which are prompted by assaults on democratic politics.
What I found especially interesting was that the CHP leader Özel made a call for consumer boycotts against companies connected with President Erdogan. And that this call was denounced by the government as an outright act of sabotage that imperils the national economic interest. But unlike Russia, Turkey lacks the natural resources that could keep its currency afloat and its economy stable, if the markets punish it for this kind of turn to autocracy. Could the structural effects of socioeconomic hardships be then compounded by the burden of President Trump's tariffs, and together they would then paradoxically pave a way towards much greater democratization?
SÖ: First of all, Turkey got a light tariff; we're at the 10 percent level. And again, your listeners would not know this, but yesterday during the photo-op session with the Israeli Prime Minister, Bibi Netanyahu, Mr. Trump expressed his great affection and friendship with President Erdogan. And he even suggested to Netanyahu, that if he had any problems with Erdogan, he should tell Trump. And then he would adjudicate. Also, it tells you how unpredictable Trump can actually be. I'm sure when he announced that they were directly negotiating with Iran is not what Mr. Netanyahu went there to expect either.
Anyway, Turkey is still a very big economy. All markets in the world are in turmoil today because of the announcement of tariffs. So, we are really going also through a period when not just a trade order, but probably the economic order of the world is being transformed. And Turkey will probably have its share of that pain.
Because if the European markets shrink, if Europe goes into a recession where Turkey exports most of its goods, obviously, we will be hurting as well. So, we don't know exactly how things are going to evolve in that sense. But what Turkey does not have in terms of natural resources it has in terms of geopolitical presence, real estate value and clout. One wonders if that was also one part of the calculation. Turkey is now so important because it is between two hot spots, Syria and Ukraine. Everybody believes that Turkey has come on top of the Syrian crisis as Bashar Al-Assad’sregime failed. And it has been protectingthe acting president of Syria. It has a military presence to the north, which actually causes problems with Israel. And of course, on the Ukraine-Russia war Turkey has played a very critical role, although some Western commentators blame it for being pro-Russian. But I think by invoking the MontreuxConvention and stopping the passage of battleships to the Black Sea, it has objectively helped the war efforts in the Black Sea on the side of Ukraine. Because it held all good relations with both Ukraine and Russia, and it did not join the sanctions regime, Turkey is also seen as a possible adjudicator between the two, if the Americans also wish to give it a role. That geopolitical importance, which has risen obviously since the fall of Assad is if you will, the kind of a resource that Turkey has. And I wonder if that was part of the calculation that because Turkey has become so important, European security, if NATO is going to be without American commitments cannot be really provided without Turkey.
All of those may have led the government who took those steps to think, okay, we're so important geopolitically; everybody needs us, they won't give us much of a headache, so let's go ahead and do it. I still think the timing is odd. They had plenty of time until 2028, but I've tried to give you some reasons as to why I thought they've done it now. But I think if it did not totally boom around or backfired, it certainly proved to be a huge miscalculation.
SR: You make a pertinent point here about looking at all of these developments in a larger geopolitical context. Not only is there a very cordial relationship, as you pointed out, with President Trump. The European Union continues to rely on Turkey, for gas imports as well as blocking the flow of refugees and immigrants from Syria and Afghanistan. But as you very correctly pointed out, it's the recent souring of transatlantic relations, so in that context Europe is even more dependent on Turkey given the relative weight of its military within the security framework of the NATO andTurkey having played a clever balancing game in the Russo-Ukrainian war. The Syrian story isstill evolving. It's unclear how stable this will be and whether that opens a path to reconciliation with militant Turkish groups who have not lost US support.
So let me close our conversation by asking you to talk about the new geopolitical era, which we are entering. What kind of future does this kind of geopolitics have for democracies in the region? Does it become easier to dismantle democracy domestically because would-be autocrats can then blackmail an increasingly fragmented international community, if the latter can rely on strategic partnerships with various autocrats for their own ends?
SÖ: It's not just the new geopolitics that are going to be an impediment to a return to a more liberal democratic atmosphere across the world. It is also the new political economy. I mean, if in the United States the new top-ranking capitalists are the techno bros, they have no concern for democracy, civil rights. And these are guys who don't really need workers, not many. So, the political economy and the structure of employment of that political economy, plus the ideology of those guys really run counter to what I suppose you and I believe in.The United States, for all its problems, war and all, still represented at least in ideal form, a reference point for a democratic system. Its systematic destruction domestically sets a very bad precedent elsewhere.
I cannot really vouch for its success, but for every place where there is repression, I also see a lot of resistance. And in my estimation, the most powerful resistance comes from women because this trend towards more authoritarianism is also a trend towards more patriarchy and, the resistance of women, therefore, becomes a source not for their own individual salvation, but also for safeguarding democratic individual rights.
This is going to be a very fierce battle. And technology can be used by states, but technology can also be used by people. What kind of equilibrium we will find between states that want to control everything and populations that want to resist that degree of control, I really don't know.We may end up with a mixture of Orwell, and Huxley. Or we may end up with something actually that is more open to a participatory or freepolitical environment.
So,the trends across the world are really what I count on, and that puts a lot of responsibility on the shoulders of a continent that was actually left for dead in terms of inspiring anyone politically. And that's Europe. Because although the European countries also face their hard right-wingers, proto-Nazi parties, racism and all that, still they do maintain institutions, structures and proclivities, if you will, to keep their democratic systems in place.
We are entering a Hobbesianworld where principles and values don't count, but might is right, if you will. You can call it Hobbesian or you can call it back to Thucydides when in the Melian Dialogues the Athenians say to the millions: Well, the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. And that's not a precursor to a very democratic environment either internationally or domestically. I think that is the fight of the day. And it will be incumbent on the formerly consolidated democracies, if you will, to regather their troops and then rekindle their democratic spirit.
Otherwise, there will be a very long, andI think, very brutal contestation between repression and resistance for the relevant future. That's how I see it. Can we have three major powers dominating their neighborhoods and then not meddling into one another'saffairs. And maybe even a civilizational divide in the world where you have the Chinese national interest being expressed in civilizational terms, Russia does that and maybe Christian nationalists, if they can maintain power, will do the same for America. And I think part of the reason why part the American right is so enamored of Putin is precisely on the basis of that Christian solidarity. That kind of a world will not have room for democracy. So, we have an interest in not having a tripartite world, if you will. The more multipolar the world is, I think the better the international environment could be reshaped, and this is what we ought to be working and fighting for. And we will have to go through this before we find a new point of equilibrium, which I believe, or I hope, will be much more stable and calmer.
SR: Thank you so much Soli for this really insightful, deep dive into Turkish politics, but also this wide-ranging discussion of regional and global geopolitics, especially as it affects both the authoritarian current phase that we are seeing, but also the future of resistance. Thank youvery much for joining me today.
SÖ: Oh, thank you for having me.
SR: Today's episode began with a discussion of the causes behind the mass rallies being held in numerous Turkish cities since over a month. Soli Özel explained that one can speculate that the arrest of Istanbul's Mayor Imamoglu was prompted by the regime's fears of his popularity.
He has won the nomination for running against President Erdogan in the 2028 presidential elections and his party, the CHP, has had considerable success in recent local municipal elections as well, which would lend it a great momentum. The regime probably knows and fears that it has alienated large sections of its own population.
Paradoxically, the preemptive repressive measures of the Erdogan regime, including this overtly autocratic turn, has now triggered the Turkish people's fierce resistance to what they see as an outright attack on the very core of electoral democracy. Soli formulated it elegantly and eloquently when he said today, whatever their understanding of democracy or the practice of democracy, the Turkish public still believes that the ballot box is sacrosanct, and that is where the will of the people really gets reflected. Interestingly, this exposes the Achilles’s heel of all soft authoritarian regimes. They can ill afford to give up the pretense of respecting the will of the people and of securing legitimacy through winning competitive through hardly free and fair elections.
So, the tactics and strategic dilemmas of the Erdogan regime are hardly exceptional as they follow a familiar script we have seen unfolding in many other countries too. What Soli has emphasized, however, is that instead of obsessing about the toolbox of soft authoritarianism and the spread of illiberal practices, even in consolidated democracies, we should be paying greater attention to forms of societal resistance to these regimes and to an effective mobilization in defense of democratic politics.
What is also pointed out is the uncertain open-ended temporality of protests, which is perhaps a key factor in the longer run. Neither those in power nor those who are protesting in the streets can take for granted that they will come out victorious in this kind of a protracted conflict. The politics of civil society that uses the public space as its theater may well be the most effective means to enact democratic politics in the face of autocratic threats.
But ultimately, it also requires the support of strong political parties ready to embrace much needed internal reforms. The current geopolitical context and the collapse of the post 1945 liberal world order may not be particularly favorable to the defense of democracy against would be autocrats. It may even lead to what Soli described as a mixture of Orwell and Huxley.
Nevertheless, the courageous resurgence of democratic engagement and resistance to authoritarianism in the streets of Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir and all over the country is a positive sign that young people and ordinary citizens are willing to protect democracy. This should offer us all some hope that a freer more open and participatory world is possible if we are willing to bring it about.
We will also explore the challenges of civil society mobilization against corruption and repression led by students in Serbia in the next episode.
This was the fifth episode of Season 10. Thank you very much for listening and join me again in two weeks’ time when I'll be talking about another wave of social and political protests. This time, the ones that are sweeping across Serbia. My guest will be Ivanka Popovic, former rector of Belgrade University and Vice President of the European University Association, who is an astute observer of these protests, but is also an active participant in this student-led movement.
Please go back and listen to any episode you might have missed, and of course, let your friends know about the podcast, if you're enjoying it, you can stay in touch with the work of the Central European University at www.ceu.edu and the Albert Hirschman Center on democracy at www.graduateinstitute.ch/democracy.
[ii] Nacim Pak-Shiraz on Cultural Contradictions in Iran | Central European University