The devil we don’t know failed, and the devil we do will now get worse – more paranoid and more prone to quashing dissent than before.
Pre-coup, Erdogan locked up journalists, bullied the opposition, stifled Kurdish dissidents and even tried to get a Germany comedian locked up for insulting him – prompting a masterful riposte from UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson.
At Heat Street, we’re none too keen on any of that (except Boris’ poem, which is excellent). So here’s a collection of things President Erdogan would rather forget – protests, cartoons, caricatures and images showing the sheer strength of feeling against him on his own doorstep:
Turkish protesters march on Erdogan’s education ministry in late 2014. They hold a banner showing him as a sinister Sultan figure, a reference to his efforts to inject more religion into the school system and create an “Islamic youth”
A topless activists for the Femen group is arrested by police with the word “dictator” scrawled across her body in red paint in July 2013
Erdogan is branded as a money-hungry sellout by opponents in the Turkish Republican People’s Party in July 2007. The text reads “the Republic is not for sale”
A blunt protester in Lebanon holds up an image of disfigured Erdogan in June 2005. She was part of an Armenian group demanding that Turkey acknowledge the Armenian genocide of 195-1917, a point of contention in Turkish politicsProtesters keep up the pressure, more than 11 years later at a rally in Washington, DC, this March when Erdogan visited the US
Erdogan is mocked as an Ottoman-era Sultan trying to subjugate the secular Turkish state by a US protesterTurkish riot police violently detain a Kurdish dissident in Istanbul this March. Rubber bullets were used on the crowdsWater canon and tear gas are deployed on people gathered outside the offices of the Zaman newspaper in Istanbul, demanding that Erdogan cease his campaign to oppress the media