Turkey's reaction to protests follows Islamist playbook

Oren Dorell @OrenDorell | USA TODAY

The Turkish prime minister's dismissal of anti-government protests as the work of opposition thugs fits a pattern of how many Islamist political leaders are responding to legitimate criticism of their regimes.

Islamist leaders in Egypt, Tunisia and Turkey have shown an arrogance toward opposition views, breeding frustration that exacerbates civil unrest and instability and is likely to spread as democratic reforms continue to sweep the region, analysts say.

"The similarity is quite striking, (but) not that surprising," because Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and other Islamist leaders "have a similar view of democracy," says Shadi Hamid, director of research at the Brookings Doha Center.

They believe winning elections gives them a mandate and considerable latitude to pursue their vision, even in the face of significant opposition, Hamid says. "There's less of an idea of consensus building or taking into account the positions of the electoral minorities."

The democratic changes that followed the Arab Spring revolts have led to the political rise of Islamist groups sidelined or repressed by Middle East political structures for decades. In Turkey, Erdogan's Islamist government has gained power in part by eroding the once powerful influence the nation's military had on politics.

While the Islamists have taken advantage of democratic elections, they appear not to have embraced another feature of Western democracy: protecting minorities from the majority.

Protests that erupted last week in Turkey started out as a peaceful demonstration against a government plan to build a mosque and shopping center in an historic Istanbul square surrounded by outdoor restaurants and bars. When police tried to break it up with force, however, the protest evolved into a mass movement against what many Turks describe as an increasingly authoritarian government that's pushing a religious agenda and ignores minority views.

Demonstrators who took up the cause in dozens of Turkish cities protested a recently passed law banning retail alcohol sales between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. and the issuing of new licenses for bars within 100 yards of a mosque or school.

What happened next was similar to how Islamist governments responded to secular opposition in Egypt and Tunisia.

• Erdogan on Monday refused to back away from the development plan and said "I am not going to seek the permission of (the opposition) or a handful of looters." In a speech over the weekend, he warned demonstrators that if they bring 200,000 to the streets, his supporters would bring 1 million.

• Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi declared unchecked executive authority and used his powers to push through a constitution drafted by an Islamist-dominated committee. When tens of thousands of people protested outside his presidential palace, he described them as illegitimate thugs, and declared that "God's will and elections made me the captain of this ship." Thousands of his supporters filled the streets to offset opposition protests.

• In Tunisia, civil unrest erupted after secular opposition leader Chokri Belaid was assassinated. When Prime Minister Hamadi Jebali proposed a unity government to quell the unrest, Islamists blocked it, saying it would be wrong to give up any electoral gain.

"This is what the West will have to contend with," says Eric Trager, an expert on the Muslim Brotherhood at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Islamist parties tend to view democratic institutions as useful in the short run but lack a commitment to democratic values such as checks and balances that allow political minorities to force compromise on the majority, and "the result of that is instability," Trager says.

"People (in the opposition) are no longer willing to tolerate a situation in which even elected government acts repressively," he says. "That's not to say those elected governments will be replaced, but the reaction can be destabilizing and economically harmful."

Hamid also thinks the conflict between Islamist governments and those who do not support them fully will continue to spread because the Arab world and Turkey are dealing with the role of religion in public life, after decades of repression, and the two sides are far apart ideologically.

Each side thinks that "If your opponents win it will change the fundamental nature of society or the state," Hamid says.

Feeling are so strong in Egypt, that some secularists have said they prefer a restoration of the military dictatorship that governed the country for decades,

Hamid also thinks the conflict will be seen in more countries, especially Syria, where the Islamist-secularist and sectarian fault lines are the reason many Syrians fear a mostly Sunni rebellion will succeed.

Michael Rubin, an analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, says many Turks believe Erdogan has become less committed to democracy and that the Turkish leader "has dispensed with this idea that there should be compromise," Rubin says.

Rather than draw a parallel with Tunisia, however, Rubin sees similarities with another popular, elected throwback kind of president: Valdimir Putin of Russia, who has overseen a drastic backslide on democracy in the former Soviet Union.

"In the Arab Spring a lot of the protesters were Islamists" bringing down long-standing dictatorships, Rubin says. "In the Turkish spring, people feel the country's no longer democratic. He (Erdogan) seems to combine the worst aspects of Morsi and Putin."

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