It’s all gone quiet in Turkey. Actually, it hasn’t – only in the western media.

After what were largely peaceful, legitimate protests, first there was the crackdown in early June, when protesters were violently ejected from Taksim Square, which resulted in four deaths and thousands injured. Since then, lower key but perhaps more worrying things have happened: there were 23 arrests of protesters on suspicion of ‘terrorism’. But this looked suspiciously like a definition of ‘terrorist’ which includes ‘people I don’t like’.

And then, last week, Turkey’s Islamist prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, petulantly threatened to sue the Times following a critical piece. So much for free speech.

At least, over the last few months the prime minister has had a warning shot across the bows – he didn’t expect this kind of reaction over a mere park redevelopment. But it doesn’t look much like he’s changing tack, either. Apart from his clear taste for illiberalism, he has more plans to redevelop Istanbul against the wishes of its inhabitants, and is busy converting Christian churches into mosques, apparently in a symbolic bid to ‘revive Ottomanism’.

What has changed over recent weeks, of course, is that a few hundred miles away in Egypt there has effectively been a coup d’état, although admittedly against a president who didn’t seem very keen on democratic handovers himself. The army has taken power, supposedly on an interim basis.Egypt may just have escaped with its newfound democracy intact; it depends on a lot of things, not least the good faith of the generals to make good on their promise of calling fresh elections and to respect the result. Either way, they need to find some way to keep Mohamed Morsi’s supporters part of the conversation, or ultimately end up in civil war.

But all this must be rather concentrating the minds of Turks, if only to realise how quickly things could get out of hand in their own country (Erdogan has already moved swiftly to limit the power of his own army, which would handily decrease the probability of an Egyptian-style takeover).

But if I were a forward-looking and forward-thinking Turk, I would be considering my possibilities. Keep my head down and hope for the best? Fight for democracy? Or simply leave the country, if I have the means to do so?

The problem is that, in a country which has known democracy only sporadically during the postwar period, many people are not yet so overwhelmingly convinced of its benefits that they are prepared to fight to the death for it. That is a shame: they’ll surely miss it when it’s gone.

Turkey is now at a historical turning point: it can either drift backwards into an authoritarian netherworld, or resurge forwards towards the modern society it has been gradually building, where religion and secularism are both largely respectful and tolerant of each other.

Unfortunately for younger, modern Turks, Erdogan has a reliable, conservative constituency in the rural Turks who do not form part of the westernised metropolis that is Istanbul, or the other major cities. They are quite happy to see in Erdogan a bit of conservation of old Turkish ways, rather than the iPhone generation values of the youth they see around them.

Islam and democracy are not incompatible: modern Turkey itself is proof of that. What seems increasingly evident is that Islamism, that modern combination of Islam and a politics with highly conservative tendencies, is still proving itself within democracy. Many have voted in Islamist parties in a number of states. We certainly cannot make the assumption that all citizens of Muslim-majority countries are of a mind to reject a conservative Islamism – after all, they have voted in its parties in a number of states. We might not like it, but that’s democracy.

But it is also patronising in the extreme – at worst, what has been described as the ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’ – to assume that all people in those countries embrace an overweening state and religious power that we would not tolerate, especially once they have witnessed first-hand what that means and what the resulting direction of travel is. In the end, if the protests and their aftermath have proved anything it is that the west cannot take its eye off the ball and must keep holding the government to account; and that Turks need to decide how much they really value democracy and freedom.

And, by the looks of things, it is not a decision they can take too much time in pondering.

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Rob Marchant is an activist and former Labour party manager who blogs at The Centre Left. He tweets @Rob_Marchant

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Photo: Dawid Krawczyk