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ISTANBUL — Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan had warned that his patience was running thin. On Tuesday morning it finally ran out: Police used water cannons and tear gas to shoo away the protesters who have been occupying Taksim Square for more than a week to save the neighboring Gezi Park from redevelopment. The crackdown turned this major thoroughfare into what a Hollywood agent would pitch as Woodstock meets Mad Max 4.

By midmorning the banners bearing the names of leftist groups, the charred buses and the crowds were gone. By lunchtime the throngs were back. And so were the police. A violent game of cat and mouse continued through the night.

Chief feline is Erdogan himself. While the police were busy in the streets Tuesday, the prime minister was addressing his supporters in Parliament in hurt, paternalistic tones. The protesters simply don’t understand they’re playing into the hands of a “usury lobby” that wants to keep Turkey weak so that interest rates will rise, he said. He accused them of holding muddled positions, posing as environmentalists while burning police cars and traipsing into holy places with their shoes on. (This last charge refers to an incident in late May when demonstrators fleeing pepper gas and police batons sought sanctuary in a mosque.) He even said that the residents of Istanbul who beat pots and pans at night in solidarity with the Taksim protest were contributing to noise pollution.

And to those throughout Turkish society, from clerics to stock brokers, who are urging the prime minister to adopt a more conciliatory tone, he said: “Sorry, Tayyip Erdogan is not going to change.”

In a rare concession, the government whose forces spent Tuesday night clearing Taksim Square has nevertheless allowed the occupation of Gezi Park to continue. The prime minister has also agreed to meet representatives from the park campaign, despite his skepticism. “Does anyone know what they want or an inkling what their demands are?” he asked members of his party.

Erdogan must be calculating that since he is damned if he appears to be giving into the protesters’ demands and damned if he insists on having things his way, he might as well play tough; that, at least, may rally the party faithful. Ever since he returned from a trip to North Africa last Friday, Erdogan has been hitting the stump, addressing supporters from the top of election-campaign-style buses. His party is planning a show of strength — with huge rallies in Istanbul and Ankara scheduled this weekend — to impress upon the Taksim Square demonstrators that they are outnumbered.

“Say the word and we’ll be there! We will crush Taksim Square!” chanted the crowds that met Erdogan at the airport upon his return to Istanbul. (The sentiment is theirs; the doggerel translation mine.) That morning six pro-government newspapers ran the same headline: “Democracy Demands Sacrifice.” The loyalist media and their readers, conditioned by Turkey’s history of military takeovers, say the protest isn’t about saving trees but about laying the groundwork for a coup d’état.

Yet revolution is the last thing on the minds of the twenty-somethings who have been flocking to Gezi Park at night and then leaving bleary-eyed for work the next morning. They don’t want to seize the state so much as teach it to behave: There is — it cannot be said often enough — a court injunction against the development plan. The protesters want a government that is accountable, that doesn’t mind if they have an occasional drink, that doesn’t bully its citizens.

Can the police chase this spirit down the back streets? Should it even try? The protesters have already managed to turn the prime minister’s tough talk against him. He calls them “louts,” and they collect the trash. After one television station, kowtowing to the government, showed a documentary of penguins instead of live footage of the protest, a penguin wearing a gas mask became a symbol of resistance. Worse than defying the prime minister, the protesters are making him look like a fool.

By dint of their imagination, humor and self-possession, they are proving themselves to be just the kind of people who should make up the “new” Turkey that Erdogan’s party promised to create when it came to power in 2002. When Erdogan says he hasn’t got an inkling what the children of Taksim want, that may be all too true, but it’s his confusion not theirs.

One poster on the square, since cleared away by the police, subverted Erdogan’s exhortation that Turkish women have at least three children: “Do you really want two more like me?” Yes, please.