God doesn't have a stick
Why I didn't see the protests coming, and what can be learned from that
What is happening?
Everyone I talk to is in shock. Turkey is witnessing what is easily the biggest political event since the 2016 coup attempt. It’s difficult to wrap one’s head around it.
Since the arrest of İstanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, the country has been experiencing the biggest popular uprising in recent memory, one with far more potential than the 2013 Gezi Park protests.
I think that it’s important in these moments to stop and think about why this is all so surprising, and what can be learned from that fact. To structure that reflection, I’m going to go back and look at my own analysis on this blog, be very precise about what I got wrong, and revise my analysis. I’m sometimes told not to do this, that readers want to see some kind of omnipotent I-told-you-so blogger-God, but I hope that’s not you, dear reader. Because let me tell you: absolutely nobody saw this coming. We all knew that these elements existed in society, but we didn’t know that they’d come together this way, and combust in quite the spectacular fashion they have.
So without further ado, I think there are two big things that I got wrong. Helpfully, these are also the things that the presidential palace got wrong. Make of that what you will.
The first is that I believed that the Erdoğan palace was aware that they were increasingly unpopular, but that they would succeed in managing the situation.
Let’s recap.
In 2023, a deft mix of economic policy and nationalistic campaigning allowed Erdoğan to deliver a crushing defeat on the opposition. In 2024, however, the CHP won big in the regional elections, wiping out the AK Party in nearly all the major cities. The main view at the time, which I think holds up, was that Erdoğan decided not to fire up the election economy and to cool his jets on the nationalism. Would people vote for him just because they loved him, even in a dry, pre-austerity economy and boring mayoral candidates? The experiment in itself was an expression of just how confident Erdoğan was in his electoral abilities. He had beaten the opposition handily in 2023, and now he wanted to do it with no hands.
They found out that this was hubris. People really wanted the economic stimulus and jingoistic rhetoric. Luckily for the presidential palace, the stakes were low. Municipal elections are not existential. Some of the mayoralties could even be taken back by arresting mayors and appointing caretakers in their place.
But here’s where I was wrong: I thought the palace had probably registered a failure of sorts, and that they’d adjust. They’ve done it before, most notably in 2015. This is from my piece then:
As damaging as this is, Erdoğan could recover from it. These things can be pretty brutal in the AK Party. I’m sure that we’re going to witness some defenestrations in the coming weeks and months. But reform is hard. Erdoğan has tried it before, with talk of “metal fatigue” and promises of a better politics. What if he doesn’t make it, while he watches the CHP and DEM build on their success?
The lesson the palace will have drawn from this election is that the new regime is always at risk. This may not have been an existential election, but 2028 will have to be. It’ll take them some time, but they’ll come up with a new plan.
I think that I underestimated just how deep the rot went in the presidential palace. It seems that the new elite was so confident in their position that they rationalized away their loss and thought that they could continue behaving the way they were. Perhaps hubris isn’t something that you can just shake off after a loss. Or perhaps it’s ingrained in the institutional culture, so that even if those at the top were alarmed, they couldn’t tighten up the lower ranks. That’s why it was so striking how sloppy the legal cases against İmamoğlu and his team are today.
İmamoğlu and his team are running a megacity, and I’m assuming that it wouldn’t have been hard to come up with dirt that actually sticks. I’m pretty sure that the regime is watching the CHP elite’s every move using their intelligence capabilities, a practice that goes back to the Gülenists. So the fact that Erdoğan’s people failed to put together a convincing show tells me that they still thought that their side was politically invulnerable. These people were probably spending too much time counting their money or holidaying with their girlfriends to put some elbow grease into their dirty work.
I also suspect that the palace continues to be way too focused on their foreign and defense policy, and that their success in that field gives them a false sense of confidence. You can hear that in Erdoğan’s speeches. He thinks that he has single-handedly raised Turkey’s status from being a defeated country into one that is a power player, and he expects voters to be deeply impressed by that. I think that they might have been, if the standard of living hadn’t slid quite as badly as it has, and if the corruption and moral debasement of his people wasn’t quite as nakedly displayed for the public’s inspection.
The second thing that I was wrong about is the popular sentiment, and specifically the amount of politicization in the opposition.
After the opposition lost in 2023, its base was devastated. For many, it showed that even when economic and social conditions were in their favor, the opposition’s elites were too eager to cling to the liberalism of the 2000s, and too timid to come up with a formula that matched the times we live in. This meant that they kept on energizing their base, but couldn’t deliver victories, which crushed people’s will to continue. Perhaps this was one defeat too many.
and I predicted that this defeat could break the opposition’s will to stick together and resist:
The political outlook is grim. Even in this tightly constricted present, the opposition voter finds that the parties she voted for are not fit to represent her. The “düzen muhalefeti” (“opposition of the order,”) as some commentators now refer to most of the opposition, is in crisis. The CHP and İYİ Party have shown that they are incapable of reform. Opposition voters could seek refuge in political apathy, or they could venture to the extremes, most likely nativist parties who want to outflank the Erdogan government from the right. This disarray makes it easier for Erdoğan to shape the opposition in his nationalistic image. The president is now effectively the leader of a broad spectrum of right-wing parties. His last feat in politics could be the creation of his own opposition.
The palace must have thought so too. They probably concluded that they had broken apart the opposition, and that they had a free hand in redesigning it. Ideally, they would prune the CHP into a Eurasianist-Kemalist force (like Cumhuriyet newspaper), making it unable to unite the Turkist of İYİ and left-Kurds of DEM in a joint oppositional front.
The CHP figure with the widest political reach is without a doubt İmamoğlu. Istanbul really is a microcosm of Turkey, and allows skilled politicians to stretch out to encompass the depth and breadth of the electorate. The palace’s game plan was probably that once they took İmamoğlu in, the CHP’s leadership would run around like headless chickens, then pivot to either Ankara mayor Mansur Yavaş or chairman Özgür Özel as their presidential candidates, and move on. The great 2028 danger ticking away in İstanbul would have been diffused, and the world would settle into its new normal, with Erdoğan dominating everything.
In some ways, this did happen. In the early hours of İmamoğlu’s arrest, the CHP’s initial reflexes weren’t great. They might just have sucked it up.
But opposition voters (and perhaps others) weren’t apathetic. They weren’t ready to give up on politics, the electoral system, and Republican government. The student protests on the morning of the 19th emboldened others to take to the streets, and their example has grown into a broad-based public movement that’s breathing new life into opposition politics.
So let’s take a moment to look at the details here.
Young people in Turkey are far more political than they used to be. The intensity of politics, especially since the coup attempt of 2016, as well as fast-evolving digital technology, has created a hyper-aware and hyper-sensitive new group. They might go through phases of following FX markets, race theory, or critical theory, within the span of a year. That kind of spiritual metabolism is hard to keep up with. I witnessed a few years ago how my 15-ish gamer cousin went from being a quasi-fascist to a communist in a year, just by following YouTube rabbit holes. The fact that his parents were lifelong Erdoğan voters didn’t really factor into his journey — just the opposite: he persuaded them not to vote for Erdoğan in the 2023 elections. He actually accompanied his father to the ballot box to make sure “his hand didn’t succumb to old habits.”
As far as the students on the street, it makes sense to talk about the left and right separately.
It seems to me that some of the elite among the students, meaning those who come out of the most prestigious universities, are leftists. It was them who initiated the protests in Istanbul University, and their action creates the feeling that the best and brightest are now mobilized, which gave moral impetus to the whole protest movement.
Most young people on the streets, however, are not leftist, but a new kind of Turkist-nationalist. Turkism used to be a pretty orthodox endeavor. You became part of the Idealist hearths [Ülkü Ocakları] as a student, then continued your life in its hierarchy, and attached yourself politically to the MHP. As the MHP was effectively acquired by the AK Party, its allure with a new generation of Turkists faded. Turkism has since been detaching from its hierarchical organization, becoming a looser, but more disseminated political movement and ideology. So Turkism and what we used to call “Ülkücülük” seem to be separating. The new form is more Kemalist, less organized, more gender-neutral, more anti-immigrant. (For more on this, see this report by the Institute of Social Studies.)
If the protests were simply composed of left-liberals, the regime would have no problem simply steamrolling them, since they usually assume that these people are either not popular with broader segments of society, or that even if they are, they aren’t popular with people who might otherwise support them. The fact that the protests are (as far as I can tell) kindled and led by the left, but demographically anchored on the right, and is mostly non-Kurdish, makes this a very tricky problem for the regime.
All this is to say that the youth-led public backlash was not something that I or the regime anticipated. They probably thought that even if there was a backlash, it would be Gezi-like, in the sense that it’d be people on the streets, and the CHP being mildly critical and distant, defending their grievances but refusing to take a leadership role. That’s not what happened. The CHP has caught the wave early and is surfing it, putting it in danger of being an effective political party. The nightly rallies, the call for citizens to vote in the presidential primary (gathering more than 15 million votes), and the boycott, are unexpectedly aggressive behavior from the CHP. I wouldn’t put it past them to screw this up, but so far, they are really developing a relationship with a base that’s far wider than their electorate.
Those are the two things I didn’t see coming, and I’m a bit ashamed to say that there’s a lot of overlap with the things the Erdoğan palace didn’t see either.
So let’s review.
First, I thought that the palace would learn from the local elections in 2024 that it wasn’t invulnerable, but they didn’t, and they kept taking their dominance for granted and were sloppy in devising strategy and execution. If they were more diligent, they could have attacked İmamoğlu’s reputation for a few months, and then arrested him, or attained some kind of leverage against him, or those around him. If they anticipated problems with university students, they could have made the arrests in the summer, when the campuses are mostly empty. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that they screwed up a lot of small things here.
Second, I didn’t think there was so much fight left in people, probably because I didn’t think about young people very much. Erdoğan’s people clearly didn’t either.
And that second point kind of counteracts the first: it’s tempting to think that the palace could have avoided the broad-based, and very much systemic public resistance against it, but maybe something similar would just have happened in some other way. Public pressure was building up for a long time, the palace no longer had the ability to diffuse it, to it was going to break. Many of the young people attending these protests insist that it isn’t just about İmamoğlu, that they were there to get “justice,” and to get to a post-Erdoğan Turkey they can be proud of. I think the majority of the country wants that too. The regime will throw all of its repressive capacities at the problem, but they have to realize that they’re no longer fighting a political party or small group, they’re fighting a moral force that’s much bigger than that. I predicted before that they would step up their game, and I was wrong. Maybe they just lost their touch for good. Stranger things have happened.
What does that mean for the immediate future? How long will the protests and boycotts continue? Will the prisoners be released? What’s the role of international actors? Can the economy take it?
I don’t really know, and I’ll discuss just how little I know another time. For now, I just wanted to revisit my analysis, and I think I’ve done that. I don’t expect we’ll all agree, but I hope it’s interesting to think about. And in my defense, predicting broad social events is incredibly difficult. As a wiser many once said, “predictions are difficult, especially about the future.”
The outcome of course, is far, far from certain. Things could still go south for the opposition, and the regime could regain some security, but I still think it’s remarkable how sharp its fortunes have reversed within the span of a week. In Turkish we say “God doesn’t have a stick,” the implication being that he finds creative ways to beat you down when you least expect it.
1) Completely agree and appreciate that you’re not going the omnipotent I-told-you-so blogger-God route, please don’t ever. 2) Your second-to-last paragraph reminds me of a Zbigniew Brzezinski quote: “theory — at least in international relations — is essentially retrospective” which I read as a student of IR and deeply appreciated. It is what it is. The best we can do is always be open to learning and refining as we go, which goes back to point #1. Thanks for the great analysis as always.
Another excellent and very pragmatic article Selim!