With Tuesday's violent police operation to clear out the protestors from Taksim Square, the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan may have temporarily won the battle to control that patch of downtown Istanbul, but its actions came with a high price, inflicting heavy damage on its international standing and setting the stage for what is likely to be prolonged conflict, something that will only further harm the country.
One only needed to take a look at CNN and its hours of live coverage devoted to the police takeover of Taksim and the ensuing protests to realize that a new narrative was being developed about Turkey. Erdogan and his Islamic-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP) may have spent the last ten years cultivating an international image for Turkey of a tourist- and international finance-friendly democracy on the rise, but the images that were being shown on international television screens told a very different story.
In that sense, today's events helped speed up what was becoming a problematic dynamic for Erdogan and his government over the past 11 days of ongoing protests in Istanbul, Ankara and several other cities, in that the kind of questions about the PM's increasingly autocratic rule that were previously only asked domestically were now starting to be discussed more regularly internationally.
Lebanon's As-Safir newspaper, for example, yesterday ran a column noting the unfavorable similarities between Erdogan and heavy handed Egyptian leader Mohammed Morsi. So much for Turkey being a model for the emerging democracies of the Middle East, it would seem. (Writing in Al Monitor, Semih Idiz has a bit more about how the Istanbul protests are undermining Erdogan's regional credibility.) Meanwhile, while only a few weeks ago many American media outlets were touting the strong working relationship between Erdogan and President Barack ahead of the Turkish leader's mid-May visit to Washington, now suddenly that relationship is being portrayed as a potential problem for Obama.
With the tension and potential for violence in Turkey likely to persist after today's events, the battering that Turkey's image has taken will also have economic consequences. As CNBC reports, Cumberland Managers, an American institutional investor with some $2.3 billion in assets under management, has just pulled all its money out of Turkey. "We have taken Turkey to zero. Contagion risk is rising," Cumberland's chief investment officer, David Kotok, told CNBC. Of course, the impact on tourism to Turkey has already been significant and could get worse if the government fails to find a peaceful solution to the current crisis (and let's not even talk about where all of this leaves Turkey's bid to host the 2020 Olympics).
What certainly can't be salvaged after today is Erdogan's now tarnished legacy. The still powerful PM might yet go on to win a few more political victories, but they will marred by the memory and images of what happened in Taksim.
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