Erdogan’s Fateful Season
The real danger for the Turkish prime minister is in the warning signs of the economy.
Summer 2013 has become a major milestone in the career of Turkey’s popular and populist Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The Taksim-Gezi Park protests that broke out in Istanbul at the end of May, beginning of June have made Erdogan tenser than ever. Some of his domestic allies have abandoned him. But the prime minister, with an amazing display of energy, hit the road, organized mass rallies and began to challenge all opposition with hard-line polemics.
The tremors in Turkey were followed by the events in Egypt, the toppling and detention of Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi in a military coup, removal of the Muslim Brotherhood from power and then massacres of Muslim Brotherhood supporters in Cairo’s two squares.
