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The tragicomic soccer fiasco was part of “a broadly based problem of people engaging in lawlessness and thinking the government will back them,” said Ilter Turan. a political scientist at Istanbul’s Bilgi University.

“The soccer chief was not happy with the outcome of a game and he essentially detained them, which was totally unlawful. The reason he was so bold is that he thought nothing would happen to him. Such behaviour is replicated across society.”

Turks will get a chance to vote on the state of their country in parliamentary elections on Sunday, elections that many see as a referendum on the 13-year rule of the president and his AKP party.

Erdogan is a larger than life figure prone to wild statements and grand gestures. Depending on whether you are for him or against him, he casts a brilliant light or a giant shadow over Turkey.

During his three terms as prime minister, he presided over the country’s remarkable rise as an economic power, while courting approbation at home and in the West for undoing some of the secular policies of the father of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

Over his years in power, Erdogan has also become increasingly authoritarian. He began to curb human rights, cracked down on social media, censored journalists and has been accused of inciting violence to further his own political ends.

Many Turks were scandalized when he spent the more than $1 billion to build a 1,150-room presidential palace that included 250 rooms for his family. He has further baffled his fans and foes with odd pronouncement, such as claiming Muslims had reached the New World three centuries before Columbus.