My eyes can’t get enough of the trees — They’re so hopeful, so green — Nazim Hikmet (1948)

IT was very much in “Crisis? What crisis?” mode that Turkey’s prime minister embarked this week on a scheduled trip to North Africa.

Cancellation or postponement might have been perceived as a sign of weakness and Recep Tayyip Erdogan is clearly in no mood to properly acknowledge the unexpected challenges that have sprung up at home.

He has dismissed a week of burgeoning protests, mainly in Istanbul and Ankara but with echoes in dozens of smaller towns, as the activism of malcontents spearheaded by “extremists”. He has hinted darkly at external influences without naming any country, possibly to pre-empt accusations of implausibility, while decrying modern methods of communication.

“There is now a menace called Twitter,” he declared without any hint of irony. “The best examples of lies can be found there. To me, social media is the worst menace to society.”

It is unlikely Erdogan would have endorsed such a sentiment had it been expressed by, say, Hosni Mubarak in early 2011, given that social media was deemed to have played a significant role in mob-ilising the popular upsurge that supposedly blossomed into the Arab Spring. Erdogan posited Turkey as an ideal model for the unfolding Middle Eastern transformation.

It could no doubt be argued that, for a variety of reasons, Taksim Square does not fall into exactly the same category as Tahrir Square. Yet there are resemblances, too.

Turkey certainly isn’t the kind of autocracy Egypt had morphed into under 30 years of Mubarak’s rule: Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) has won three consecutive — and ostensibly fair — elections. Yet the prime minister’s authoritarian streak has increasingly been in evidence, and his efforts towards introducing a new constitution that would usher in a presidential system, enabling him to make the transition from head of government to executive head of state via a direct election next year, account in part for the growing popular consternation towards him after a decade in office.

It is also worth noting that one of the reasons Twitter has lately served as a primary source of news in Turkey is that the mainstream media is considered unreliable. Television channels reportedly continued to broadcast cookery shows while the police were brutally tackling protesters on the streets of Istanbul, and newspapers are broadly divided between those owned by AKP allies or cronies, and others that habitually resort to self-censorship amid regular intimidation by the authorities.

Last year, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists noted that 61 Turkish journalists were in prison — a higher number than in Iran or China — and cited Turkish press freedom groups as saying that up to “5,000 criminal cases were pending against journalists at the end of 2011”.

Last week’s protests began with a relatively small and peaceful demonstration against a plan to bulldoze 606 trees in Gezi Park, reportedly one of the few remaining green spots in Istanbul, in order to construct a shopping mall modelled on Ottoman-era barracks as well as a mosque. It spiralled into something much bigger largely as a spontaneous response to police action, eventually bringing out in force various segments of society resentful of Erdogan’s rule — and sparking mobilisations elsewhere across the country. Although the police were withdrawn from Taksim Square for a day or so, the use of teargas and water cannon accounted for innumerable injuries. As of yesterday morning, two deaths had been reported.

The AKP government has been credited with presiding over reasonably steady growth and ambitious infrastructure projects, but there is a dark side to the latter aspect with reports of corruption amid disrespect for Turkey’s architectural heritage. “Again and again, people have protested the destruction of some historical building or the construction of some shopping centre,” Elif Batuman writes in The New Yorker. “Again and again, the historical building has been destroyed and the shopping centre constructed.”

The AKP and Erdogan have also accumulated kudos for blunting the Turkish army’s capacity for political intervention, which once periodically thwarted progress towards democracy. The military also saw itself as a protector of Turkey’s secular traditions, and many of the liberals who appreciated its return to the barracks have also been alarmed by what they see as the creeping Islamisation of society. “We don’t want to become Iran,” has been among the opinions heard during the past week.

The BBC’s Paul Mason commented on the weekend that “the breadth of popular support” he witnessed “within the urban enclave of Istanbul” was broader than what he had seen at the Syntagma protests in Greece and “closer to Egypt”, and suggested it could be “the Turkish Tahrir” if “the workers join in”.

On Monday, the Kesk trade union confederation, which represents 11 unions, announced a two-day strike as a protest against “state terror”.

It does not necessarily follow, of course, that this is the beginning of the end for Erdogan, who is acknowledged to be the most powerful politician Turkey has seen since Kemal Ataturk. But his future could depend to a considerable extent on whether he can moderate the arrogance that has lately led him to make threats instead of contemplating judicious compromises.

The ongoing unrest is a warning, loud and clear, against his tendency to ignore the opinions of those who do not support him. Based on the last election results, that means roughly half the population. Some analysts suggest his Putin-esque presidential ambitions have already become unrealisable. That may well be so, but the popular momentum for change demands other concessions. A relentlessly confrontationist approach on the part of the authorities will only clog up the avenues for peaceful progress.

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