Turkey heads to the polls on Sunday to popularly elect a president for the first time. It’s an important moment in the country’s democratic history.
Or at least it would be were the election’s presumptive winner—Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of the Justice and Development Party (AKP)—not showing ever more troubling signs of moving towards a political model best described as one-man rule.
Erdoğan’s authoritarian tendencies were plain long before the Gezi Park protests of last year, which started as an environmental sit-in at one Istanbul’s few remaining parks and quickly transformed into a full-blown struggle against repression after the government cracked down on it with startling brutality. But images of one of the greatest cities in the world choking on clouds of tear gas and awash with the high-pressured discharge of water cannons nevertheless came as a wake-up call for many who had presumed the prime minister a moderate.
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Since then, Erdoğan has consistently dipped into the pages of the dictator’s handbook, decrying perceived internal and external enemies with a mind to sow fear and loathing throughout the electorate, purging state institutions of those he considers his opponents, and monopolising the media while the other presidential candidates struggle to hit the front page or prime time. And yet he remains—as strongmen are occasionally wont to—significantly popular throughout the country.
Matthew Clayfield
Matthew Clayfield is a journalist, critic and screenwriter.
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