Despite starting with a government-shaking bribery scandal marred by extra-legal actions, 2014 was still marked by the lingering spirit of the Gezi.
What had Turkish civil society learned from Gezi? Could that solidarity endure? Would the protests transform into an organised movement? How had global dynamics shifted? And how did the political powers respond?
At the conference hosted by Heinrich Böll Stiftung Turkey that year, the Gezi protests –later criminalised after the 2016 coup attempt– were discussed as a democratic right and opportunity.
That year was one of stark contrasts: The Istanbul Convention came into force, while the Soma mine disaster claimed hundreds of lives. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan became the first president elected by popular vote, yet a regulation granting sweeping powers to the police was introduced.
Democracy was swiftly shifting toward populism, discussions of authoritarianism were spreading, and the dual, complex nature of Turkey’s transformation was becoming increasingly apparent.
1 – Carbon-based and aggressive development, lack of precaution, disaster... In 2014, 301 miners died in a coal mine disaster in Soma. Lawyer Can Atalay was to pursue the case for years. (Picture Alliance/dpa) 2 – Poster for the screening in Germany of the documentary Tigris Rebels, filmed in 2014 with the support of hbs Istanbul, which unfortunately could not be screened in Turkey. (hbs) 3 – Kurds crowding the border after the ISIS siege of Kobane. The ambivalent stance adopted during the siege and the subsequent clashes also impacted the ongoing Peace Process in Turkey. (Reuters/Kadir Celecan) 4 – Poster for Yeryüzü Aşkın Yüzü Oluncaya Dek (Love Will Change the Earth), a movie about Gezi protests, which was censored during its screening at the Golden Orange Film Festival in Antalya. (Yeryüzü Aşkin Yüzu) 5 – A shot from the Supreme Court vote in parliament after the 17-25 December corruption operations. The operations were framed as a coup attempt aimed at displacing the executive branch rather than a fight against corruption. The unlawfulness of the released records led to the events being recorded in history not as a quest for transparency but as a struggle for political power. (Hürriyet)