Questions Erdoğan will have to face up to

The month of May opened and closed violently in Turkey. No doubt it will be so for years to come. We had the May Day demonstrations that were repressed by excessive police force first, and finally the Gezi Park demonstrations that were repressed by police brutality, as the whole world saw over the weekend.

In both cases, the police were encouraged by Erdoğan not to stay its hand. He expressed surprise recently at how “tolerant” the Turkish police were against demonstrators. He also warned people not to go to Taksim to mark the first anniversary of the Gezi protests, saying the police had been instructed “from A to Z” to do what is necessary if they did.

Erdoğan clearly sees an existential threat from educated and liberal youth, trade unions, Kemalists, Alevis, social democrats or a mix of all of these. This fear has resulted in his use of repressive police measures, rather than democratic means, to try and stabilize Turkey politically.

Those looking at his victory in the March 30 local elections, and the positive way that international financial circles reacted to this, will say, of course, that Erdoğan is successful politically. This is true for the short term. The local elections showed that he has enough support to continue as he is doing.

How Erdoğan hopes to stabilize the country in the medium to the long term in this repressive way, however, and turn it into the international success story he dreams of, remains a mystery.  He is also successful politically today because there is a class war of sorts going on in Turkey.

The conservative Anatolian masses and their counterparts in the cities, which suffered under repressively secularist and anti-left wing Kemalist administrations before...