Comment to Khalil Al-Anani's Turkey’s uprising is beyond the Islamists

Comment to Khalil Al-Anani's Turkey’s uprising is beyond the Islamists, published Thursday 13 June 2013 on Arhamonline

Hi Khalil, I wrote an opinion piece a couple of days ago in Italian, totally indipendently from yours, which I just read, but which was reaching very similar conclusions. It is in Italian, this is a link to the article: http://istanbulavrupa.wordpress.com/2013/06/15/tayyippuccio-scelebano-e-parricidi-tayyippisti-di-alessandro-riolo/ I start with a parallel between the 12th year of rule of the Christian Democrats in Italy, 1958, when they lost the control of the streets and sent their police to shot protesting people in the streets. The spark of that revolt was very different, but the causes are much more similar, during a susteined economic growth a great minority of people thought, rightly, that the government was ruling against them, and had lost hope to influence the government through the ballots. The effects in the Italian history were monumental, in the next couple of years after the revolt the christian democrats changed their policies, mitigated their authoritarian attitudes relegating to the fringe their more conservative wing, and presieded over a huge economic leap forward in the '60s. Later I talk about RTE, and compare him with Mrs. Thatcher, and I close the article asking if the AKP will be able to perform what the CHP was never able to do, a political ritual parricide, replacing RTE with someone more amenable a less authoritarian way to rule the country.

Caveat: I do use a few untranslatable word plays, i.e. Mr. Scelba was the Italian christian democrat who in the '50s gave the Italian police its pro-conservative character, so Scelbano is someone who's following or liking its authoritarian policies, a word which I modified in Scelebano to resonate with Talebano, the Italian version of Taliban. Tayyippuccio is the somewhat affectionate diminuitive I do often use when referring to Mr. Erdoğan, and the Tayyippisti are its followers (again, the word in Italian resonates with Teppisti, that's it hooligans or thugs)