Love Recep Tayyip Erdogan or loath him (there really is no middle ground when it comes to the Turkish leader), it cannot be denied that the Prime Minister is one of the towering figures of modern Turkish political history. The changes he has brought forward in Turkey are monumental and the series of victories he has led his Justice and Development Party (AKP) to at the ballot box are uniformly impressive.
One of the reasons Erdogan has been so successful is that he has always possessed keen political instincts (coupled with a good dose of luck) and the ability to get a very good read on Turkish public sentiment. This allowed him to move his agenda ahead by frequently utilizing the politics of polarization, taking steps that would anger an ever-diminishing minority whose ineffectual response would nonetheless further mobilize Erdogan's broader base of support. It's a pattern that had repeated itself over and over again over the last decade.
Which is what makes the mass protests in Istanbul and across Turkey over the last few days all the more surprising and significant. For the first time, Erdogan's politics of polarization have not only stopped working but have blown up disastrously in his face. Could Erdogan, that master taker of the Turkish nation's pulse, be losing his touch?
One area where we clearly get a clue of this is with regards to social media. Erdogan has spent the last few years working hard to create a docile domestic media, one so scared of crossing the government that it willingly self censors. The early hours and days of the protests in Istanbul were case in point: while the city's Taksim Square was covered in tear gas and running battles between police and protestors were taking place in various locations, CNN Turk was running a cooking show and documentaries about dolphins, while another network was showing a program about radiation on Mars. Things have gotten so bad that protestors even started demonstrating today in front of NTV, one of Turkey's main broadcasters, accusing the network of failing in its duties to deliver the news.
At the same that the traditional media has been slinking off into a corner, social media has become increasingly prominent in Turkey in recent years. As a 2012 Pew Research study shows, Turks -- especially those in the 18-29 age group -- are big users of social media. Twitter in particular has become increasingly popular in Turkey. So much so that it appears to have become an important element of spreading news about the protests in Istanbul and perhaps helping them grow.
As a new post on the The Monkey Cage blog by researchers with New York University’s Social Media and Political Participation (SMaPP) laboratory suggests, "The social media response to and the role of social media in the protests has been phenomenal." From the post:
What is unique about this particular case is how Twitter is being used to spread information about the demonstrations from the ground. Unlike some other recent uprisings, around 90% of all geolocated tweets are coming from within Turkey, and 50% from within Istanbul (see map below). In comparison, Starbird (2012) estimated that only 30% of those tweeting during the Egyptian revolution were actually in the country. Additionally, approximately 88% of the tweets are in Turkish, which suggests the audience of the tweets is other Turkish citizens and not so much the international community....
....What this trend suggests is that Turkish protesters are replacing the traditional reporting with crowd-sourced accounts of the protest expressed through social media. Where traditional forms of news have failed to fully capture the intensity of the protests, or to elucidate the grievances that protesters are expressing, social media has provided those participating with a mechanism through which not only to communicate and exchange information with each other, but essentially to take the place of more traditional forms of media. Further, this documentation through multiple sources in public forums serves to provide a more accurate description of events as they unfold.
What this may also suggest is that Erdogan and his government may have lost track of how Turks consume news and information these days. Having an impotent media is simply not what it used to be. Erdogan, not surprisingly, quickly took aim at social media, saying: “Right now, of course, there is this curse called Twitter, all forms of lies are there. This thing called social media is a curse on societies.” But, as the Wall Street Journal pointed out, Erdogan and his ministers all have Twitter accounts with a large number of followers and many of Erdogan's important advisors are savvy users of social media. Declaring war on Twitter is not a likely -- or advisable -- next step for the PM.
These are early days for the continuing protests in Turkey and it's still not clear what the political fallout from these recent events will be for Erdogan and the AKP. Still, the party should be concerned. Its main asset over the last ten years was that it was led by a consummate politician who also had the Midas touch, at least in terms of moving his and the AKP's interests forward. The protests of the last few days and Erdogan's tone deaf and, not surprisingly, polarizing response to them indicate that the PM has not only lost some of his touch but is also dangerously out of touch.
Sign up for Eurasianet's free weekly newsletter. Support Eurasianet: Help keep our journalism open to all, and influenced by none.