Tahrir notes

While we here keep debating whether a tahrir will or will not come out of Taksim, and if it does, by which road it will pass and where it will lead, Taksim looks completely different from Tahrir. As one can imagine, everyone's eyes are on Turkey and people are full of curiosity about where this will end. But even if the images reflected from Taksim to here are carried by CNN, the BBC or Al Jazeera, people receive them after filtering out the commentary these channels paste over or under the images.

On CNN International, Amanpour does to Egyptian Prime Minister Hisham Qandil, whom she put on air the next day, something similar to what she did to İbrahim Kalın. On air, as she said, "Are the events in Turkey, in which you place your hopes, worrying you? After all, a big protest against the government is being prepared in your country too on June 30," she was floundering, with all her dreams and expectations about the Islamic world packed into a single question. Hisham Qandil answered quite coolly: "There is no situation that calls for concern; such events take place in all democratic countries, and Turkey is in a position to deal with these events in the best way."

From the way the foreign media reflects what is going on in Turkey, the great majority of the Egyptian people draw conclusions not about Turkey but rather about this media itself. In Egypt too, trust in the media is extremely weak. In elections, votes are distributed in a way very different from the atmosphere and preferences that dominate the media. An Egyptian academic puts the situation like this: "If you look at the atmosphere dominating the newspapers and televisions, neither the Ikhwan nor the Salafis should have received any votes at all. This stems from the Ikhwan being very weak in the media but, in return, very well organized in the deep layers of society."

In fact, the reason for our coming to Cairo was a conference planned long in advance with the cooperation of the Strategic Thinking Institute and the Al-Ahram Democracy Review, to be held with the participation of the Prime Ministry's Public Diplomacy Coordinatorship and the Presidency for Turks Abroad and Related Communities. The conference consisted of sessions at which comparative studies between the democratization experiences of Turkey and Egypt would be presented. But the Taksim events became the most important subject, addressed in all its dimensions throughout the entire conference.

I can say this: the great majority of Egyptians are saddened by this event, but all of them, even without knowing any detail, read the event as a national and international conspiracy against the person of Erdoğan. Even when they ask questions about the events, they do not hide that they are more eager to hear something in Erdoğan's favor. That is why the picture of Turkey reflected by the international news agencies is perceived in itself as an assassination attempt against Erdoğan and Turkey.

Egypt is witnessing different tensions these days. A big protest demonstration with the participation of all the opposition parties is being prepared against Morsi's leadership on June 30. Serious concerns are being shared that this demonstration may turn into clashes. All the curiosity and questions about Turkey are at the same time aimed at requesting a message for Egypt's agenda. Those opposed to Morsi, while asking about the AK Parti model, want to hear how far it is from the Ikhwan's Freedom and Justice Party. Morsi's supporters, too, want to see or to show that the attacks Erdoğan was also subjected to in the past are of the same kind as the criticisms Morsi is subjected to today. In fact, in this context, for every segment, even if opposed to one another, Erdoğan and the AK Parti thus constitute an indisputably followable model. The debate takes place over who is closer to this model in discourse and practice.

A reporter from one of the televisions I gave statements to asked me, since most of those who voted for Morsi are illiterate ignorant people, whether running democracy under Egyptian conditions could always be risky and what the solution to this might be. Another, after I explained that, although Morsi's party will take the majority of the votes, the ballot box is not everything in democracies, asked how this problem could be overcome. Turkey's quality as a model stems not, of course, from the level it has reached so far being sufficient and perfect, but from the roads it has traveled being instructive roads. There are extremely open traces of the road in Turkey for the answers to these questions that are voiced with such heat in Egypt today.

An influential journalist opposed to Morsi, after criticizing Morsi quite a lot throughout the whole night, explained that the people love him very much and that the real problem was this. Of course there are those who do not love him as much as those who do. He promised, for example, that if he won the elections he would solve a host of problems such as traffic, water and electricity within a hundred days. But at the end of the hundred days, let alone being solved, the problems have deepened further. In Cairo there are electricity cuts of several hours every day. A serious water problem is also at the door because of the Nile basin crisis with Ethiopia. In fact everyone is ready to hear that all these problems cannot be solved within a hundred days, but Morsi's having uttered a hundred days for the solution of problems that even a superman could not solve in so short a time creates a big gap in his credibility and trustworthiness.

Of course one of the most important criticisms of Morsi is that his community's (the Ikhwan's) influence is excessive. It is not known whether Khairat el-Shater or Morsi is running the country. All these problems lead everyone to look back at the Turkish example more with each passing day.

There is no doubt that the way Prime Minister Erdoğan ultimately resolved the crisis through his meetings with the Gezi Park parties will, just as everywhere in the world, have opened a new and original field in Egypt too in which the Turkey model can be followed.