‘A protest in every square’

After almost two weeks of demonstrations against Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government, thousands of people occupied Istanbul’s Taksim Square over the weekend. Other protests were held in Ankara and Izmir.
Faced with growing dissent, the prime minister has organised several rallies of his supporters, where he warned that his patience has “limits” and challenged his opponents to beat him in municipal elections in March 2014.
It is an attitude that tends to “pour petrol on the flames instead of dousing them,” argues Radikal, which points out that “the dangerous path taken by the government” now involves the use of religious arguments as well as —

… mobilisation of the masses against the demonstrators, provocation, coercion, and threats directed at the secular bourgeois elite, which include [a pledge] to take a hard line with its opponents.