How Erdoğan made Turkey authoritarian again

In each of these countries, government power has become highly personalized—overwhelmingly concentrated around a single, larger-than-life ruler who attempts to assert direct control across almost every aspect of state and society. Such leaders and their supporters tend to justify the accumulation of such sweeping authority as the only way to catapult the country forward—the path to national strength and renewal.

The turn toward strongman politics has touched almost every corner of the globe in recent years, agnostic to geography or culture. The ostensibly Islamist Erdoğan was among its pioneers, starting in the mid-2000s alongside Vladimir Putin in Russia and the now-deceased Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. But today its influence extends much further—from Viktor Orbán’s Hungary to Rodrigo Duterte’s Philippines.

The rise of strongman regimes is, of course, organically linked to the well-documented erosion of democracy that has taken place globally over the past 15 years. But the impact of the strongman model is actually broader than this, not only breathing life into sham democracies like in Russia and Egypt—where elections are held but blatantly rigged—but also reshaping unabashedly authoritarian governments like in China and Saudi Arabia. Whereas a decade ago Beijing and Riyadh were both characterized by a kind of collective, institutionalized leadership, they have since moved away from this in favor of a paramount decision maker with decisive say over the country’s direction.

There are numerous factors that have contributed to the spread of strongman rule. Most fundamental, though, is the perception that the model works. Human rights and civil liberties are all well and good, the reasoning goes, but when the world is on fire, it’s necessary for someone to take charge—someone tough. Strongmen may be prone to excesses, but they have the guts to do what needs to be done—and when the alternative seems to be gridlock and stagnation, it isn’t difficult to see why these arguments get traction.

The seductive draw of this logic, moreover, is not limited to nationalists and populists. Plenty of Western pundits and investors—including some of the same disciples of globalization who rage at the likes of Donald Trump or France’s Marine Le Pen—have a track record of going weak-kneed in the presence of modernizing autocrats, especially those who show up at Davos with PowerPoint decks promising painful structural reforms, crackdowns on corruption, and lucrative infrastructure projects. It turns out the case for enlightened despotism can be persuasive for self-styled liberals, too, especially when the despotism is in someone else’s country.

Turkey under Erdoğan for many years offered a particularly compelling strongman success story. Sure, some independent media outlets began to be shuttered as early as the mid-2000s, around the same time as the first mass arrests of retired military officers on dodgy charges took place. Yet as with the mysterious murders of Kremlin critics in Russia during this period, such incidents were easy to write off as unfortunate if creepy anomalies. The more important story in both cases was understood to be that these countries finally had capable, hard-driving leaders with the power to pull them out of the doldrums to which they had so long been consigned.