“For a few years, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s mercurial prime minister, was on top of the world. In 2011, as regional leaders fell around him like dominoes, his Justice and Development Party (AKP) won a landslide election on a massive turnout. That same year, his visit to post-revolution Egypt was marked by adulatory crowds, many of whom admired Erdogan’s willingness to take on Israel, at least rhetorically, and saw in Turkey a marriage of Islam and democracy that might yield lessons for the countries emerging from the Arab Spring. Regional surveys consistently showed that Turkey’s favourability rating in the Muslim world had soared over the past decade, and that Erdogan was the region’s most popular figure by far. Moreover, he had appeared to vanquish the traditional scourge of Turkish democracy: the coup. Remarkably, over half of Turkey’s admirals and many of its generals languish in jail, many on allegedly trumped-up charges.

Just a couple of months ago, Erdogan was still using this capital to make audacious political moves. In March, he extracted an apology from Benjamin Netanyahu for an Israeli raid on a Turkish aid ship in 2010 that left eight Turks dead. The apology was a symbolic and diplomatic triumph. That same month, he took an even bolder step, and secured a ceasefire with the insurgent Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), laying the groundwork to end a conflict that has bled Turkey for decades. This was strategically astute. In unlocking Kurdish support at home, it was politically even more so: Erdogan’s ultimate goal has been to circumvent term limits by modifying the constitution and taking over a beefed-up presidency, even in the face of resistance from the country’s constitutional commission and his own party.”

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