bolyai

Tell them about the gas prices in Turkey too.. :))

Edit for the impatient: It's 3 times that of US.

Another Turk here, let me give it a go:

The point of the protesters isn't to overthrow Erdoğan or refuse that he's elected fair and square (although see the caveat below). We are just saying that acquiring the electoral mandate is but one part of the democratic process, there are many others, like the separation of powers (which Erdoğan openly admits is a hindrance to his reign), free courts, free journalism, a general willingness to listen to what all of your people has to say, being unable to systematically bully all the opposition into silence etc. We maintain that he either rejects or is a threat to all of these, hence the uproar. One of the common questions asked by the protesters is "what happens when a democratically elected leader acts undemocratically?" That's the problem that's driving almost all of the protesters. This article sums up our grievences pretty nicely. And this is the most evenhanded and comprehensive article I've read about the protests, from The Economist. I strongly recommend it.

Furthermore, about the fairness of the elections in Turkey: We don't have a two party system over here (I believe we had 21 parties in the last election) and a party has to get more than 10% of the votes in the general election in order to be represented in the parliament. That's by far the highest threshold in Europe and to put it in perspective, "The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe recommends for parliamentary elections a threshold not higher than 3%" (from the election threshold entry of wikipedia).

This resulted in 46% of the voters not being represented in the parliament after the 2002 elections, Erdoğan's first victory. This is not Erdoğan's fault as this has been the case in Turkey even before his time but 1) it shows just how fair the election system is and 2) he continues to shut down the efforts in the parliament by the opposition to lower this threshold, the last one being as recent as last month I believe.

Fellow Turkish protester here. Just to clarify, yesterday the spokesperson for the ruling party AKP announced that an Istanbul- or district-wide referendum about the prospect of the park may be a possibility. We are not impressed by this, and there are many reasons for this, to me most important of which is that there is currently a court order to halt the demolition of the park, and it's the legal consensus here in Turkey that a referendum cannot supersede the decision of the court.