Gezi Park: negotiating a new left identity.

• Author: Eskinat, Dogan
• Position: COMMENTARY - Essay

If anyone claimed that what began as a minor protest at Istanbul's Taksim Square on May 27, 2013 would develop into one of the greatest challenges to the Justice and Development Party's decade-long tenure, they would be discredited as delusional and uninformed. However, more than a month of protests effectively put the movement's influence beyond dispute. More important, however, was that the mass reaction to the police's disproportionate use of force against peaceful activists on May 31st evolved into one of the most interesting political experiments in the Republic's 90-year history, as people from all Left convictions camped out at Gezi Park and (perhaps for the first time ever) talked to each other about the country's future and their expectations. For nearly two weeks following the governor's decision to withdraw police forces from the Taksim area, Gezi Park was home to an amorphous group of people including LGBT activists, Kemalist hardliners, revolutionary Left parties, Kurdish nationalists and others who felt their voices had been unheard for too long at a time when the Justice and Development Party's popular support uniquely qualified Prime Minister Erdogan and his cabinet to single-handedly influence the country's future. This new beast in Turkey's political habitat, which proved difficult to tame despite all efforts, represents a call to Turkish Left, whose democratic credentials have been less than ideal, to revise leftover policies and alliances from the Cold War period in order to speak for underrepresented groups.

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Before moving onto our discussion of the Gezi Park movement as a social force that might reform the Turkish Left's old ways, let us briefly recall the history of the Left's alliance with the Kemalist bureaucracy. Turkey's restoration of its multi-party democracy in 1946 following over twenty years of singly-party rule under the Republican People's Party led a group of parliamentarians to establish the Democratic Party. The Democrats came to power only four years later. Throughout the 1950s, the party's policies helped forge an alliance between the Kemalist bureaucracy and the Left. On one hand, the Democrats' economic liberalism effectively undermined the livelihood of urban working classes and lower ranks of the bureaucracy. Moreover, the party's attempts to revise certain policies that were part of the Republic's authoritarian modernization drive in the 1920s and the 1930s alarmed the...