‘Shoot some pepper gas at me!’ football fans vs. Erdoğan: organized politicization or reactive politics?

In June 2013, during the Gezi protests against the Turkish Government, football fans in Istanbul appeared to be key elements in the movement, challenging common opinion which qualified them as a passive social element. Another major factor in the movement was the use of social media, especially Twitter, by mostly middle-class people with anti-government views. This paper examines a sample of independent, Istanbul-based match-going football fans’ political expressions on Twitter between 2012 and 2015 to attempt to uncover whether their online political expression hints at an organized and durable politicization or rather a spontaneous reaction against the government’s attempt to replace the core values, or ‘doxa’ of the republic, with Islamist principles. The findings of the research suggest that the fans’ lack of political engagement or experience prevented their involvement from having a serious political impact, a feature shared by most layers of the middle classes in Turkey, which may have blocked the Gezi Movement from making further political gains.