Category: Turkey

Pushback against populism: An end to Grand Strategy?

     

Populist politics tilts authoritarian. In sweeping away supposedly corrupt elites and institutions, the populist leader weakens all forces standing in his way. Critics becomes enemies, constitutional constraints become obstacles to… Read more »

Turkey’s ‘soft dictatorship’: How to combat Erdogan’s illiberal populism

     

Istanbul’s new mayor says his election victory against Turkey‘s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s party carries an important lesson for the world’s populist leaders: Act against the will of the people… Read more »

‘Autocracy Now’ – personalized authoritarianism

     

  The leading figures on the world stage today practice a brutal, smash-mouth politics, a personalized authoritarianism, notes Foreign Affairs editor Gideon Rose. Old-school strongmen, they do whatever is needed to… Read more »

Do protest movements generate democracy? Liberalism of the streets

     

Events in both Moscow and Hong Kong show how single-grievance protests can evolve into wider movements, argues FT analyst Gideon Rachman:  Between them, Russia and China represent the major geopolitical… Read more »

Post-Erdoganism? Istanbul election shows resilience of Turkey’s democracy

     

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is grappling with the fallout of the ruling party’s big defeat in the Istanbul mayoral election, and his government faces pressure to release political prisoners,… Read more »

Why the Russian model will not work for Turkey

     

On June 23, somewhere between 8 and 9 million residents of Istanbul will go to the polls to elect their mayor—again. The leading contenders are Ekrem Imamoglu, a dynamic young… Read more »

How authoritarians are ‘dismantling democracy from the inside’

     

Authoritarian learning facilitates the ‘dismantling of democracy from the inside’, The Washington Post’s Amanda Erickson writes. It used to be that autocrats came to power through coups or by enacting states… Read more »

Conservative civil society pushing back against Western liberal norms

     

The rapid rise of Brazil’s new far-right leader Jair Bolsonaro may have surprised some observers but it did not come out of thin air. His success follows years of support… Read more »