| Summary/Abstract |
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan — Turkey's current president (elected 2014) and former prime minister (2003–14) — in his first decade in power, won three parliamentary elections by ever-larger shares of the popular vote because he had helped to build Turkey into a burgeoning economic powerhouse and a moderate Islamic democracy. In the past half-decade, however, despite winning Turkey's first popular election for president in August 2014 and presiding over another great parliamentary victory in November 2015, Erdoğan's increasing authoritarianism has helped precipitate the disastrous decline of the nation as well as his own inevitable fall from power. What happened, and what lessons can be gleaned? Can Turkey's decline be reversed and its progress revived?
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