Thousands of Turkish lawyers aligned themselves this week with a growing protest movement that began to take shape in early June when crowds gathered in a central Istanbul park in an effort to thwart construction of a government-backed shopping mall.
The Istanbul demonstrations, which have spread to other Turkish cities, including the country’s capital of Ankara, have gradually developed into an impromptu referendum on the leadership of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a reformer elected to office in 2003, who, as noted in a lengthy 2012 story in The New Yorker, has taken an increasingly hard line against his foes.
