#chapuling

June 20, 2013

Protests over the demolition of a park in the Taksim Square area of central Istanbul have spiraled into a mass protest movement that is rocking Turkey to its core. Increasingly at the center of the discontent is the authoritarianism of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP). But demonstrators are also driven by simmering anger at the AKP's neoliberal agenda.

In this article written earlier in the month--before the assault on the Gezi Park occupation on June 15--T. Sabri Öncü, an economist and head of research at the Centre for Advanced Financial Research and Learning, Reserve Bank of India, explains the background to the uprising against Erdogan and the AKP.

WHEN TURKISH Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called the protesters in the streets of Istanbul plunderers (çapulcu in Turkish) on June 2, he contributed a new verb to the English language. A video clip of the resistance--entitled "Everyday I'm Chapuling"--hit the Internet on June 4 with new lyrics written to the pop song "Everyday I'm Shufflin'."

And the new English verb was born: to chapul. Soon after, the word moved to the French language and found a place among such words as liberté, egalité and fraternité: chapulité.

The international media have been covering the events of the ongoing uprising that started on May 27 extensively. This article focuses on the reasons behind it as well as on potential outcomes.

Prime Minister Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) took power in 2002. A darling of Western governments and media until recently, it won three elections in a row, getting about 50 percent of the votes in the last election in 2011.

Now, the AKP has more than a 66 percent majority in the national assembly, which allows its leaders to pass any law they please; they have the entire police force, which allows them to arrest or suppress anyone they want; they have the entire justice system, which allows them to prosecute whomever they like; they control the Turkish military, which allows them to dream about regional hegemony, Ottoman-style. And they control all economic and financial institutions--from the Finance Ministry to the Central Bank--to shape the economy in their own image, irrespective of the needs of the population.

The AKP has been presented by the Western media not only as a democratic model for the Muslim world, but also as an economic model for Europe during the ongoing global financial crisis. While the austerity-based economic model of the AKP has been nothing but a neoliberal, speculation- and finance-led growth model of development familiar to Indians, what their "Muslim democracy alla turca" means suddenly has become clear even to the Economist, although the Economist itself introduced the concept only two years ago with high praise.