Hubris and Nemesis, with a Turkish Accent

For a few years, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s mercurial prime minister, was on top of the world. In 2011, as regional leaders fell around him like dominoes, his Justice and Development Party (AKP) won a landslide election on a massive turnout. That same year, his visit to post-revolution Egypt was marked by adulatory crowds, many of whom admired Erdogan’s willingness to take on Israel, at least rhetorically, and saw in Turkey a marriage of Islam and democracy that might yield lessons for the countries emerging from the Arab Spring. Regional surveys consistently showed that Turkey’s favourability rating in the Muslim world had soared over the past decade, and that Erdogan was the region’s most popular figure by far. Moreover, he had appeared to vanquish the traditional scourge of Turkish democracy: the coup. Remarkably, over half of Turkey’s admirals and many of its generals languish in jail, many on allegedly trumped-up charges.