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Comment by digz | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that they are not dictators... They were democratically elected. Morsi may have lost popular support, but is democracy served by a coup every time a country's leadership's approval numbers drop below 50%? In the case of Turkey, Erdogan still enjoys majority support, and would likely win an election held today.

Calling these protests democratic is incorrect. Instead they point to a larger problem: that majorities of these countries support hard-line Islamist governments. The protesters are merely a reflection that fundamentalists (perhaps of any religion) are incompatible with a free and secular society.

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You are confusing majority of valid votes with being democratically elected. Right now, any party in Turkey needs to get at least %10 of all of the votes to make it into the parliament. Due to this, many people just vote for one of the 3-4 major parties that they think they are closest, rather than who they would like to vote most. And many of the votes are simply being wasted as they are re-distributed evenly between the parties that make the threshold. Erdogan does NOT enjoy majority support as a hard-line Islamist. There were many factions in his supporters like liberals that were happy with increased control over the military, people that are just OK with having a government that has some stability etc, and he gets many criticism from those old allies.

tl;dr: Turkish elections are broken, AKP is unlikely to fix it since they greatly benefit from it.

I have no idea how Turkish protests are not democratic. There was a court law against the park demolitions, yet the government was ignoring it and having it their way. If you are not allowed to protest that, I believe you are against protesting against NSA surveillance as well? You could just wait for the next elections and vote for Republicans... that will show them.

Your claims are not backed by any sources (at least for Turkish protests, I don't have the necessary knowledge for Egypt to make claims). I am afraid you were misinformed and/or biased.

Erdogan was democratically elected but so was putin and so was saddam hussein. The problem (and the primary cause of the dictator slur) is that Erdogan sees elections as a one shot thing - you elect me, then you get out of my way.

From day one the protests were not about democracy, but about civil engagement, something that doesn't really exist in Turkey. It is this lack of accountability, a fundamental part of democracy that makes Turkey's political system undemocratic.

Erdogan believes that "democracy is a bus, you hop on, go to the destination and get off". Democracy without engagement in a broken electoral system isn't democracy, it's a rigged game. That's the problem the Turks have, and that's why they're calling him a dictator (which in the view of some may be right or wrong).

I think it is factually incorrect to say that the late Saddam Hussein was democratically elected. You are correct that Putin was. (Hitler is another example of an elected dictator, although the thuggery of his National Socialist German Workers [Nazi] Party before the election meant that the election cannot really be called free and fair.)

"In 1968, Saddam participated in a bloodless but successful Ba'athist coup that resulted in Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr becoming Iraq's president and Saddam his deputy. During al-Bakr’s presidency, Saddam proved himself to be an effective and progressive politician, albeit a decidedly ruthless one."

. . . .

"In 1979, when al-Bakr attempted to unite Iraq and Syria, in a move that would have left Saddam effectively powerless, Saddam forced al-Bakr to resign, and on July 16, 1979, Saddam Hussein became president of Iraq. Less than a week later, he called an assembly of the Ba'ath Party. During the meeting, a list of 68 names was read out loud, and each person on the list was promptly arrested and removed from the room. Of those 68, all were tried and found guilty of treason and 22 were sentenced to death. By early August 1979, hundreds of Saddam's political foes had been executed."

http://www.biography.com/people/saddam-hussein-9347918

I was actually referring to this[1], which of course was a complete sham.

[1] - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/2331951.stm

The Turkish deputy PM is blaming Jews and jealousy of Turkey for the unrest.

Bigoted governance predicated on smoke and mirrors is not democracy.

As someone of Turkish Jewish origin, I am very aware of this.

I think perhaps my comment was misunderstood. My point was more broadly that democracy and the region are not compatible. For the majority of the last century Turkey was always the exception (albeit a weak one as the military was responsible for keeping secularism alive) to this incompatibility. But seemingly, even in turkey, that illusion has fallen apart. No one is more sad about this than I am.

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