The current Turkish government has been jailing journalists for years.

Whilst the constitution makes the country ostensibly secular, the AKP has been slowly turning it into an Islamist state. I assumed that's what was fundamentally behind the protests, but maybe it's just another anti-corporate thing.

The initial action was a picnic of 50 people to protest removal of trees from Gezi Parkı which was subjected to intense police reaction.

If you recall the London riots (during which I was in Wales), rude attitude of police and political scandals were among the suggested reasons, which are also among the facts that inducted things happened here in Turkey.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taksim_Gezi_Park

I wouldn't compare these events. London riots started after a person died while being followed by the police. At night, a group of people went close to the police station and, without any intervention by the police, started burning some of the nearby buildings. Then it just went from there without any police intervention at all. If there's one thing to say about the London riots is how polite police was with the whole events.

You assume correct, this protests are no longer really about a shopping mall or a park. There was a small protest to that and the reaction to it has set in motion a new protest that has been bubbling under the service for a long time now.

Turkey actually is a successful example of a democratic state where Islam is the religion of the vast majority, albeit it is not a Muslim state, as the constitution is religion-agnostic; nowhere in it exists a phrase which even implies that the state has an official religion. Current government follows a conservative policy and has been elected with roughly 49% of votes. This eventually gave them power and resources to work in an autocratical manner. They have also been able to enforce censorship and direct the media companies in the way they want. Turkish parliament has a total count of 550 members and 327 of these are members of AKP, which let's them legislate proposals even in situations where there is no support from the opposition (although they can't in some cases where the required fraction of parliamentarian votes are more that 50%, which is usually demanded by the constitution for some fundamental stuff, like editing the constitution text itself). Added the fact that the president is also descendant from this party, they apparently have a humongous authority, originating from a, so to speak bug in election system: A party with less than 10% vote rate can not have it's members in the parliament, which eventually let them occupy more that 50% of the 550 quota of the number of parliamentarians.

The next elections will be held on 2015, at which I expect that the votes are going to be distributed even among the three major parties, where two of these are CHP and MHP, which are defined to be social-democrat-left and nationalist-concervative-right (with no apparent tendency towards theocratic ideals) respectively. AKP will probably be in the parliament, albeit lack the dominion present today.

> A party with less than 10% vote rate can not have it's members in the parliament, which eventually let them occupy more that 50% of the 550 quota of the number of parliamentarians.

Actually it's not a bug, if they would allow smaller parties they would have 10,20,50 parties in there, some with only one person. It would be a mess - hard to make any decision.

I believe 10% leaves out a huge amount of votes, esp. in Turkey where exists 45 million voters and 60 parties. 5% or less would be a better choice.

> Muslim democratic state.

There are very, very few religious democracies, and if you only consider those both officially and effectively religious, I won’t be able to name a single one.

There's that extremely influential one, whose currency states "in god we trust".

Turkey was famously founded as a secular state (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La%C3%AFcit%C3%A9#Turkey). Things may have changed, but still ... "Muslim" probably just refers to the fact that most people living there are muslim.

I believe this is still a large portion this is Greek Orthodox Christians as well. Yet I do believe the majority are indeed Muslims.

Indonesia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancasila_(politics)

In Indonesia, you are not allowed to be atheist. You must declare yourself as a follower of one of the 6 state sanctioned religions.

Turkey isn't officially a Muslim state, it's Muslim by vast majority. It's starting to become effectively religious.

> I won’t be able to name a single one.

UK?

officially religious but not effectively.

The UK is a democracy with a state religion and a monarch. Weird.

I think this description was more akin to describing the USA or Germany as “Christian democratic states” as a majority in both of those are Christians. It doesn’t mean that Christianity is the state religion or something.

Turkey has been a successful majority Muslim but very secular and democratic state for a very long time. Maybe that’s changing …

(Ah, decisions, decisions. Sometimes I think the EU should have accelerated making a move on letting Turkey join. There are substantial risks associated with that, sure, but I also think that the EU would have had a significant chance of changing the trajectory Turkey is on.)

> Turkey has been a successful majority Muslim but very secular and democratic state for a very long time. Maybe that’s changing …

Uhm. Military coups in: 1960, 1971, 1980, as well as substantial intervention in the succession of power in 1997 that many considers a coup.

The secular nature of the Turkish state has largely remained as secular as it is because the Turkish military has a tendency to conduct coups whenever they deem someone is trying to introduce religiously motivated laws, coupled with a legal system that is frequently used to shut down political parties that mix politics and religion.

Turkey does not exactly have a very solid democratic tradition yet.

We have yet to see if the "Memorandum" issued in 1997 and allowing the current government is a sign the military has softened it's stance, but it's very clear that so far at least, the elected Turkish governments serve at the mercy of the military.

The Turkish military is much weaker than it used to be with the government having thrown many of its top leaders into prison accusing them of planning yet another coup and replacing with people that are sided with Erdogan. Still, it has a long history of stepping in if secularism is threatened so it will be interesting to see what happens in the future if Erdogan is able to stay in power and keep on implementing more and more religious policies.

Eh. Close enough, honestly.

It is not that surprising considering how many journalist have been jailed for speaking out against the current government. Turkey has been increasingly becoming more extreme as its secular government is being dismantled piece by piece and and resistance to this is thrown in jail.

As a friend of mine once said "In Turkey we have free markets, not free speech."