There are many angles to the ongoing protests in Istanbul and throughout Turkey, as there are to Turkish politics in general, but the one thing that struck me about this story when it first broke was: In what other country in the world would a national government have the power to decide whether a park in any city would be turned into a shopping mall?
Maybe France. In the 1970s.
(And yes, I’m aware of all the ironies here. Kemal Ataturk admired Jacobin centralization and brought it to Turkey; the AK Party hates the Kemalists, and vice versa; the AK Party nevertheless has adapted Kemalist institutions to their own purposes; etc.)
