The making of Turkey’s strongman
Turkey’s increasingly authoritarian leader is planning a ‘new era’—and its Western partners should be afraid
Michael Petrou
August 13, 2014
Recep Tayyip Erdogan started his campaign to become Turkish president in Samsun, the same port city where Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, began the Turkish War of Independence nearly 100 years ago. Erdogan also adopted Ataturk’s slogan from that conflict, fought against the mostly Western victors of the Great War, to describe his own political quest. It was, he says, a “war of liberation.”
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