2025-04-01
4 分钟The Economist Hello, this is Rosie Blore,
co-host of The Intelligence, our daily news and current affairs podcast.
Welcome to Editor's Picks.
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Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been running Turkey for 22 years and has spent much of that time eroding its democracy.
His government controls the courts, the security apparatus and almost all the media.
Yet until last week Turkey remained a place where the opposition could,
in theory, win elections and occasionally did, at least at the local level.
Since the arrest on March 19th of Ekrem Imamoglu,
the mayor of Istanbul and Mr Erdogan's strongest rival,
among the many of his associates, that may no longer apply.
Some have thought Mr Erdogan an aspiring dictator ever since the 1990s when,
as an Islamist, he campaigned against Turkey's secularism.
He once called democracy a tram you get off when you reach your stop.
However, his first years in power were reassuring.
It was only later that he cracked down on NGOs and used trumped-up prosecutions to attack opponents.
Mr Erdogan crushed Kurdish militias in a military campaign in 2015 and jailed peaceful Kurdish dissidents.
The next year, after foiling a coup attempt, he imprisoned tens of thousands of people,
only some of whom had played a part in the putsch and muzzled the media.