By Thomas L. Friedman
ISTANBUL — Having witnessed the Egyptian uprising in
Tahrir Square in Cairo in 2011, I was eager to compare it with the protests by
Turkish youths here in Taksim Square in 2013. They are very different. The
Egyptians wanted to oust President Hosni Mubarak. Theirs was an act of
“revolution.” The Turks are engaged in an act of “revulsion.” They aren’t (yet)
trying to throw out their democratically elected Islamist prime minister, Recep
Tayyip Erdogan. What they’re doing is calling him out. Their message is simple:
“Get out of our faces, stop choking our democracy and stop acting like such a
pompous, overbearing, modern-day Sultan.”
Josh Haner/The New York Times
Thomas L. Friedman
The Turks took to the streets, initially, to protect one
of Istanbul’s few green spaces, Gezi Park, from being bulldozed for an Erdogan
project. They took to the streets because the prime minister — who has
dominated Turkish politics for the last 11 years and still has strong support
with the more religious half of Turkey — has stifled dissent. Erdogan has used
tax laws and other means to intimidate the press and opponents into silence —
CNN Turk, at first, refused to cover the protests, opting instead to air a show
on penguins — and the formal parliamentary opposition is feckless. So in a move
that has intriguing implications, Turkish youths used Twitter as their own news
and communications network and Gezi Park and Taksim Square as their own
parliament to become the real opposition.
In doing so, they sent a message to Erdogan: In today’s
flat world, nobody gets to have one-way conversations anymore. Leaders are now
in a two-way conversation with their citizens. Erdogan, who is surrounded by
yes-men, got this lesson the hard way. On June 7, he declared that those who
try to “lecture us” about the Taksim crackdown, “what did they do about the
Wall Street incidents? Tear gas, the death of 17 people happened there. What
was the reaction?” In an hour, the American Embassy in Turkey issued a
statement in English and Turkish via Twitter rebutting Erdogan: “No U.S. deaths
resulted from police actions in #OWS,” a reference to Occupy Wall Street. No
wonder Erdogan denounced Twitter as society’s “worst menace.”
Three Turks in America responded to the events in
Istanbul by starting a funding campaign on Indiegogo.com that bought a
full-page ad in The New York Times supporting the protests. According to
Forbes, they received donations “from 50 countries at a clip of over $2,500 per
hour over its first day, crossing its $53,800 goal in about 21 hours.”
What’s sad is that Erdogan’s arrogance, autocratic
impulses and, lately, use of anti-Semitic tropes, are soiling what has been an
outstanding record of leadership. His Islamist party has greatly improved
health care, raised incomes, built roads and bridges, improved governance and
pushed the Army out of politics. But success has gone to his head. He has been
lecturing, or trying to restrict, Turks on where and when they can drink
alcohol, how many children each woman should have (3), the need to ban
abortions, the need to ban Caesarean sections and even what docudramas they
should watch. The Turkish daily Zaman on Monday published a poll showing that
54.4 percent of Turks “thought the government was interfering in their
lifestyle.”
While the parents were cowed, the kids lost their fear. I
walked with protesters on the streets of Istanbul on Saturday when the police,
armed with fire hoses and tear gas, cleared Gezi Park. The pavement literally
shook with the energy of young people telling Erdogan to back off. Or as Ilke,
30, an aerospace engineer standing next to me remarked — before we were
scattered by tear gas — “They are trying to make rules about religion and to
force them on everyone. Democracy is not just about what the majority wants.
It’s also what the minority wants. Democracy is not just about elections.”
Erdogan (like Russia’s Vladimir Putin) confuses “being in
power with having power,” argued Dov Seidman, whose company, LRN, advises
C.E.O.’s on governance and who is the author of the book “How.” “There are
essentially just two kinds of authority: formal authority and moral authority,”
he added. “And moral authority is now so much more important than formal
authority” in today’s interconnected world, “where power is shifting to
individuals who can easily connect and combine their power exponentially for
good or ill.”
You don’t get moral authority just from being elected or
born, said Seidman: “Moral authority is something you have to continue to earn
by how you behave, by how you build trust with your people. ... Every time you
exercise formal authority — by calling out the police — you deplete it. Every
time you exercise moral authority, leading by example, treating people with
respect, you strengthen it.”
Any leader who wants to lead just “by commanding power
over people should think again,” he added. “In this age, the only way to
effectively lead is to generate power through people,” said Seidman, because
you have connected with them “in a way that earned their trust and enlisted
them in a shared vision.”
Can Erdogan learn these lessons? Turkey’s near-term
stability and his legacy hang on the answer.
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on June 19,
2013, on page A27 of the New York edition with the headline: Postcard From
Turkey.
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