How Low Will Erdogan Go?

On June 7, Turkish voters went to the polls and denied President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (the AKP) a governing majority for the first time in over a decade. It appeared the AKP would have to negotiate with other political parties to build a coalition government — a clear setback for Erdogan, who hoped to use an electoral victory to consolidate his increasingly authoritarian rule. Yet the elation among those worried what Erdogan’s success would mean for Turkish democracy quickly turned to despair. Over the course of the summer, commentators went from celebrating a “carnival of pluralism and liberalism” to declaring more recently that Turkey was “on the road to Armageddon.”