Anti-Salafist Uprising in Turkey

[Leonardo17]

In your opinion, how unsettling is this unrest? Does it have any chance of deposing Erdogan, or will it only inspire further repression?

   The answer depends on many different factors. Like all populist leaders around the world they have this ability to occupy some ecological (political) niches and survive in these niches for the decades to come. You can compare this to the Rassemblement National movement of Jordan Bardela and Marine Lepen in France. You can isolate them, you can exclude them, and you can even campaign against them, but they are very resilient and will not go away completely no matter what you do.

   If you come back to what is happening in Turkey, these guys are already governing the country since 23 years. Their political predecessors were already governing important city municipalities since the mid 90’s. But if you look to the images above you can see how people are simply fed-up with these guys.

   Erdogan is currently thinking that the European have already got a lot on their plates with Ukraine right now. He is also probably emboldened by the reelection of Donald Trump. His friends in the Emirates are probably backing him as well. But the people here are very aware of everything he is doing. He is actually trying to wrap-up all the liberties and rights that we have already been enjoying for more than century now. So he is in a much different position in comparision to the Mullah's of Iran who are simply denying the Iranian people the freedoms and rights that they never really enjoyed even before 1979. 

   So nobody has a crystal ball in front of them. But I am thinking more globally: I think liberal minded / pro-democracy people around the world need to work more closely together. I think that all of these AfD-like structure will keep assaulting our freedoms continually at least for the next one or two decades to come.