Zeynep Tufekci: belief

Transcript context

…I’ve never seen any camel in Turkey. I can verify this. It’s just insane. Everybody always asks me about that, and I’m like, “What?” Now that has been corrected, Erdoğan is a complicated figure, for sure. One of the things I think is less understood is that, for a long time, he had — and he still has — a genuine support base. It’s a very complicated, long story why that is. Right now, after 20 years in power, it’s got more of a centralization-of-power story. That’s the first thing. The second thing is, when people want to understand Erdoğan, sometimes they compare him to, say, I don’t know, leaders of Iran. I’m like, you want to look at Putin. You want to look at Hungary. You want to look at Brazil. The similarity there isn’t necessarily, I think, which religion or the strength of the religious beliefs as much as, once again, a strong, popular, populist, authoritarian-leaning person getting elected and then staying in power and making sure he stays in power for a very, very long time. Actually, if anything, I would say it’s a very Western story. We have many examples of it around the world. It is not a particularly Middle Eastern version of the story, of which there are many, but that’s, I think, a different version. I think that’s largely misunderstood. Why did the Gezi protests fizzle out? They seemed promising, right? You were optimistic at one point, but something happened.…

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