In Brazil, the protesters wore halter tops and shorts. In Egypt, they wore headscarves and long sleeves. In Turkey, they wore more of the former, some of the latter, and quite a bit of face paint as well. In each of these three places they looked different, used different slogans, spoke different languages.
And yet the parallels among these three protest movements on three different continents in three countries run by democratically elected leaders are striking, not least for what they reveal about the nature of the modern street protest.
In Rio, Cairo and Istanbul, the crowds had legitimate complaints about their respective democracies. Protesters shouted, among other things, about corruption in Brazil; economic incompetence in Egypt; creeping authoritarianism in Turkey. Economic slowdown was the background to protest in all three countries, but even so, the scale of the demonstrations was a surprise. Everywhere, the numbers were bigger and younger than anyone expected.
As we’ve all been told many times, these things are easier than ever to organise. The combination of Twitter and Facebook as well as the more old-fashioned medium of television can help get people out on the street. If you’ve seen it already, in a photograph or on a video clip, then you know how to create provocative posters, wear costumes and masks, organise bits of street theatre and create chants and songs. Heavy-handed policing in several cases helped bring people out as well: Tear gas surely creates as many street revolutionaries as it discourages.
But if it’s easier than ever to get people on the street, it’s still very hard to get people to follow up with necessary organisational work. As we’ve all learned in recent years, a flash mob created with the help of the internet is not necessarily well equipped to make big institutional changes. Social media is not the same thing as social activism.
Making headlines
The courage and dedication it takes to transform a society are not the same thing as the impulse it takes to join a crowd. ‘Just showing up’ at the demonstration or the march can help create a day’s headline but nothing more. Real change requires the founding of institutions, of political parties, of news organisations, of local and neighbourhood associations, of economic clubs and discussion groups that think about the interests of the nation, not of a single group or faction.
In the end, the ultimate success of a street protest in a democracy depends on the degree to which its members are willing to turn their protest into real activism, to enter into their respective nations’ political systems, to work within the law, and to transform passion and anger into institutional and finally political change.
In Egypt, whose new democracy was by far the most fragile of the three, the protests have in this sense already failed. Egypt’s anti-Mursi activists had not yet organised themselves into a coherent political party, they hadn’t created a political programme with mass appeal or they didn’t have an alternative elite prepared to carry it out.
Without these things, their influence over the course of events was necessarily going to be limited. Knowing that they might well lose a new election, they called for the help of the army, and thus threw Egypt’s entire democratic project into jeopardy.
In Brazil, by far the strongest of the three democracies, the protests seem to have already succeeded, at least in this narrow sense: Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff was forced to appear on television and to declare, “I hear you,” and she has called for a plebiscite on political reform. More lasting change in Brazil will require the crowds of young people to create an alternative political party to the one Rousseff leads, to put aside their dislike of the corrupt political establishment and learn how to join it, to renew it, to clean it up, to change its habits.
If anything, young Turks in Istanbul face an even more difficult challenge: How to craft a political message that will appeal not just to the secular and the well-educated but to the mass of voters who brought Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party to power in the first place, and who might well do so again.
But the first step to creating such an alternative is to understand that it’s necessary to do so. It’s fine to have disgust for politicians in a democracy, as long as you’re willing to become one, yourself — and it’s excellent to dislike establishment political parties, as long as you are willing and able to build your own in their place.
— Washington Post
