A few years ago, the idea seemed fanciful. Turkey had just been hit by twin earthquakes, killing more than 55,000 people. As the country struggled to recover from the devastation, and amid a mounting economic crisis, Erdoğan’s Turkish Century seemed destined to remain confined to the realm of fantasy and propaganda. But just two years on, the stars seemed seem to be aligning. As the old order collapses, Turkey is on the ascent, and Erdoğan is poised to take advantage. With Assad gone from Syria, and Iran’s regional influence greatly diminished, it is Turkey that looks ready to fill its place.

All the while, Turkey’s profile has been rising in the West, where the fraying transatlantic partnership is rendering Europe weaker and more peripheral by the hour. As the Trump administration raises the spectre of retreat, a disoriented Europe is scrambling to shore up its defense, and Turkey — which boasts the second largest army in NATO and a burgeoning defense industry — suddenly looks like a formidable partner. Ankara seems to be aligning itself with the EU’s bloc of Atlanticist liberals, while European leaders have shown interest in enhanced cooperation. Turkey has been invited to attend various strategic meetings in Europe and the abrupt surge in overtures prompted Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan to quip that the Europeans were now “rediscovering” Turkey’s existence.

Earlier this month, Erdoğan said that “establishing European security in the absence of [Turkey] is inconceivable”. Zelenskyy was already well aware of this. On the day peace talks between Russia and the United States began in Saudi Arabia last month, which sidelined both Ukraine and the EU, it was Erdoğan who the Ukrainian President chose to visit. Only the Turkish leader was capable of projecting strength enough to command the respect of both Putin and Trump. It is clear that, in the emergent Trumpian world, one shorn of liberal platitudes about “shared values” and “defending democracy”, Erdoğan carries more weight than Kaja Kallas and Olaf Scholz. And Turkey, a Black Sea power that has retained relations with both Russia and Ukraine, as well as China and the United States, now appears better positioned than many Western states.

Turkey’s new weight in global affairs seems to have emboldened Erdoğan to take drastic authoritarian measures domestically. Earlier this week, Turkish police arrested his main political rival, Istanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, on charges of corruption and terrorism. Some 100 other people were also arrested in a crackdown on the opposition and government critics. With Trump in the White House and the EU’s relative strength diminished, Erdoğan knows there will be little substantive pushback as he employs draconian methods to extend his political longevity.

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The response to the political turmoil in Turkey has been dramatic: protesters have flooded the streets of Turkish cities and Turkish markets have tumbled since İmamoğlu’s arrest. If Erdoğan appears as an erratic autocrat at home, abroad he is seeking to depict himself as a constructive mediator and standard bearer of regional security. He has recently offered to host peace talks between Ukraine and Russia, leveraging Turkey’s middle power status to present Ankara as a constructive bridge builder. This expands on the role Turkey played earlier in the war, when, in early 2022, it negotiated the Black Sea grain deal and brokered peace talks. Positioning himself as an indispensable middleman, Erdoğan has also expressed support for Trump’s efforts to end the war in Ukraine, while the two men call each other friends. Though Erdoğan had “no meaningful dialogue” with Biden, Trump has repeatedly described Erdoğan as “a very smart guy” and “very tough”; he has also credited the Turkish President with the fall of Assad. During an official phone call earlier this week, Trump reportedly told Erdoğan that he entrusted Turkey with Syria’s fate. Matching his words with action, Trump’s pick for US ambassador to Ankara is one of his closest and most trusted associates, Tom Barrack, the top fundraiser for the President’s 2016 campaign. It’s a position that has been vacant since early September.

Marginalized by America, EU membership has also long eluded Turkey. Though it became a candidate country around the turn of the millennium, its accession was blocked, ostensibly over its democratic deficits and human rights record. But many suspected this rationale concealed an unspoken truth: Turks are Muslim and therefore incompatible with the European project, which has always been more civilizational in character than its liberal proponents like to admit. On rare occasions, someone acknowledges this. In a 2002 interview, Convention on the Future of the EU chair (and former French President) Valéry Giscard d’Estaing said that Turkish membership would spell “the end of the EU as a political union”. Two years later, internal market commissioner Frits Bolkestein said that if Turkey joined the EU, the “liberation of Vienna in 1683 would have been in vain”.

In any case, European leaders have often found Turkey more useful outside the EU than in it. During the early years of the Syrian Civil War, millions of refugees entered Turkey. Then, in 2015, an unprecedented number fled onward into the EU. Eager to prevent further new arrivals, the EU struck a deal: Brussels would pay the Turkish government to house Syrians. As far as Europe was concerned, Turkey was a convenient buffer state, useful for the offshoring of the EU’s problems rather than an equal partner. The 2016 attempted coup in Turkey contributed to a further deterioration in relations with EU countries. But recent weeks have seen a reimagining of this relationship, with a country once regarded as a fringe irritant elevated to the status of major player integral in European security.

If recent months have seen the tables turn for Turkey-EU relations, then the shift in relations with Syria have been yet more momentous. Turkey opposed Assad right from the beginning of the Syrian Civil War, in 2011, and for years furnished the Islamist opposition with direct and indirect assistance. His fall last year, and the victory of opposition forces led by former al-Qaeda affiliate, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), was celebrated as their own — and not without reason. There is talk that Turkey might train the new Syrian army and open airbases in the country; now that HTS is in power, Erdoğan is hoping to reshape the country and region to his liking. The ambition is political as well as economic: the day after Damascus fell, Turkish construction-related stocks, primarily in steelmakers and cement, soared to new heights. In Syria’s ruined infrastructure, Turkish firms see a lucrative opportunity.

Even recent massacres of members of the Alawite sect by Sunni militants have allowed Turkey to advance a long-held interest: the thwarting of the Kurdish led, US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). Earlier this month, the new Syrian government signed a landmark agreement with the SDF, which Ankara views as a terrorist affiliate owing to its ties to Kurdish militants in Turkey. The agreement stipulates the integration of all civil and military institutions in SDF-held northeastern Syria into a unified Syrian state. The deal also dissolved the SDF’s autonomous administration, which Turkey regarded as a threat to its security. Pro-government media in Turkey has framed the agreement as a success in securing the SDF’s “disarmament”. Meanwhile, a delegation of senior Turkish officials rushed to Damascus to press for its implementation in line with Ankara’s interests.

While it may yet be derailed, the agreement would remove the main impediment to Turkey-US relations: the US backing of the SDF. America currently has 2,000 troops in Syria to support the SDF in its fight against ISIS, but the Trump administration has hinted it might recall them. The agreement between the SDF and Damascus is seen as a prerequisite for this.

Erdoğan also has high hopes that he can now repatriate many of the millions of Syrians who have fled to Turkey in recent years. If Syria’s security situation spirals into further sectarian violence, Erdoğan risks paying a heavy political price. The initial arrival of Syrian refugees provoked a xenophobic backlash in Turkey, boosting the electoral fortunes of the nationalist opposition to Erdoğan, who see the presence of so many conservative Muslims in the country as a threat to Turkey’s secular tradition. They will only return voluntarily to a stable, functioning Syria. The massacres earlier this month already mean that the Trump administration is all but certain to keep its crippling Assad-era sanctions in place, which will make it far harder to entice Syrians back home. Regime change in Damascus has therefore presented Erdoğan with both immense opportunities and risks.

Assad’s overthrow has also revived talk of the so-called “Turkish model” — an old idea that held up Turkey as the pinnacle of regional success. The model is associated with Erdoğan’s 2000s-era honeymoon period with the West. Turkish sociologist Cihan Tugal has described it as “a marriage of formal democracy, free market capitalism and (a toned down) conservative Islam — Islamic liberalism”. This meant that Erdoğan’s conservative Muslim government could justify un-Islamic practices like alcohol consumption in economic terms, as essential for boosting tourism. The model was a response to the Iranian revolution and the destabilizing reverberations it had sent throughout the region; it was an attempt to incorporate the threat of political Islam rather than suppressing it. During the first decade of the new millennium, many believed the Turkish model might be the answer to the Middle East’s woes: it promised to make Islam both governable and modern.

As far as Turkey’s Western admirers were concerned, the model was a success: it nurtured the entrepreneurial instincts of Anatolian businessmen and tempered any excesses in piety through exposure to globalization and international capital markets. At the height of the Arab Spring, in 2011, when the Turkish model was being prescribed for the entire region, Turkey’s economy was growing faster than any country in Europe. Infrastructure projects multiplied, the country’s network of roads grew by 10,000 miles; the number of airports doubled to 50; Turkish Airlines flew to more destinations than any other airline on Earth; and gleaming shopping malls and mosques proliferated across the country.

At first glance, it appears that the new leaders of Syria would be the ideal pupils for the Turkish model. Syria’s interim president Ahmed al-Sharaa sounds a bit like Erdoğan did in the mid-2000s. While carefully cultivating a pious image for himself, the former al-Qaeda emir has promised an “inclusive” political process that will reflect the will of the people. He claims to have embraced pragmatism and fashions himself as a neoliberal. He’s so convincing that “globalists” of the old school have been desperate to hear more: in January, al-Sharaa’s foreign minister, Asaad al-Shaibani, was interviewed on the Davos stage by none other than Tony Blair. A few weeks later, al-Sharaa was a guest on Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart’s podcast The Rest is Politics.

Even in the unimaginably optimistic scenario that would see Syria replicate Turkey’s example, it wouldn’t be a recipe for universal success. The Turkish model always contained major flaws. For one thing, its vast economic growth was not felt by most Turks. Even at the pinnacle of the model’s supposed success, Turkey still had a high unemployment rate, and inequality was the third highest of all OECD countries. In the end, then, the Turkish model contained within it the seeds of its own demise: the new middle class that had been empowered and enriched by neoliberalization ultimately rebelled against Erdoğan’s neoliberal government, culminating in the Gezi Park protests in Istanbul in 2013. The failures of the Arab Spring, along with the government’s draconian response to the Gezi Park unrest, spelled the end for the optimistic period associated with the Turkish model. As liberal, democratic Islam and a path to EU membership receded from view, a more conservative and authoritarian version took its place. Though Erdoğan kept the neoliberalism, this vision has endured there ever since.

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At the same time, Erdoğan’s grand ambitions for Turkey’s role in the world are constrained by a gloomy domestic reality. Turkey’s economy is now in tatters. Last summer, it sank into recession and inflation has been sky-high for years, hitting a peak of 85.5% in October 2022. As of December, it was still a staggering 44.4%. In spring of last year, Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) lost the municipal elections to İmamoğlu’s secular opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) in a sweeping, nationwide defeat.

The fall of Assad, then, was a life raft for Erdoğan, as he struggled to navigate these domestic woes. But the neoliberal Islam of early Erdoğan is unlikely to provide Damascus with a similar boost. Donning a suit, courting the affections of the WEF, and preaching the gospel of neoliberalism like a Pole in 1991 have not yet enabled the new Syrian government to bring sectarian strife under control, or convince their doubters that they seek to build anything other than a Sunni supremacist state. And even if they could, the fact that the Trump administration and other Right-wing populists are challenging the entire liberal order — tearing down free-trade treaties, withdrawing from multilateral institutions, and raising the specter of de-globalization — makes the Davos crowd and their models look even more outmoded, almost like a relic.

If Turkey can’t export peace or a recipe for economic growth to Syria, Erdoğan could yet profit from war. The country’s booming defense industry is fast becoming a source of national pride. According to Erdoğan, Turkey now ranks eleventh in the world in defense industry exports. Last year, its defense exports totalled $7.1 billion, an increase of 29% from $5.5 billion in 2023, while its defense products are now exported to 180 countries around the world. In particular, Turkey has excelled in the production of drones. Its flagship product, the Bayraktar TB2, has been described as “the drone that changed the nature of warfare” for its affordability and capacity to evade air defenses.

Also burgeoning is Turkey’s space program, though few outside of Turkey may have heard about it. Turkey is building up its existing space research and development to supplement its defense industry. At the end of last year, construction began on its first spaceport in Somalia. (Turkey opened its first African military base in Mogadishu in 2017 and is rapidly expanding its presence across Africa.) Meanwhile, the Turkish government has acknowledged that it plans to use its spaceport for missile testing. In space as on Earth, Turkey has sought to diversify its foreign relations: it has applied to join the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), a planned lunar base led by the Russian Roscosmos and China’s National Space Administration that is a competitor to the American Artemis program. Erdoğan has also met with Elon Musk and the two are said to enjoy cordial relations, the Turkish president expressing an interest in collaborating with Musk in the future, since they are both “actively working in the fields of space and technology”.

With this array of cards to play, Erdoğan is now making a renewed bid for EU membership. This time, though, he is not just asking for Turkey’s accession; instead, he is fashioning himself as the EU’s savior. “It is Turkey and its full EU membership that can save the European Union from its deadlock, ranging from the economy to defense and from politics to international standing,” he said at the end of last month.

Of course, not everyone in Europe will be happy about the prospect of closer relations with Turkey. Erdoğan and his ambitions are still viewed with suspicion by many. Distrustful observers have deemed his civilizational rhetoric and aspirations “neo-Ottomanism” — an irredentist ideology that would supposedly see the return of old imperial lands to Turkey. Steve Bannon has described Erdoğan as “the most dangerous man in the world” over his alleged desire to restore the Ottoman Empire. Such fears are misplaced: “neo-Ottomanism” is more of a rhetorical device used to fire up his base than a sinister plan for territorial reconquest. Still, Erdoğan’s civilizational rhetoric makes some in Europe bristle. Only last year the Turkish President asserted that “the West’s progress — built on blood, tears, massacres, genocide, and exploitation… has temporarily gained the upper hand to strangle the divine and human-centered civilization of the East”. Such proclamations are standard fare among leaders outside the West, but surely trouble some in Europe.

Others still are concerned about Erdoğan’s “transactional” approach to foreign policy, on full display when Sweden and Finland made bids to join NATO. Erdoğan wielded Turkey’s veto power to block the membership of both Nordic states until they agreed to crack down on Kurdish exiles accused of terrorism. If some EU leaders are prepared to embrace Erdoğan to fortify European security, they know he’ll expect to receive something in return.

This week’s arrest of İmamoğlu will be another major concern for those already skeptical of deepening EU-Turkey relations. It will also be a significant test of widely touted “European values”: will European leaders prioritize defense and security (and therefore preserving their relationship with Erdoğan) over democracy? Blunt-force authoritarian tactics can only strengthen European reservations about the prospect of enhanced cooperation, but it is also entirely possible that European leaders will simply choose to look the other way: since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Brussels has pivoted to a more aggressive posture, adopting the vision of a so-called “geopolitical Europe” that is less concerned with values and has “at last learned to speak the language of power”. Erdoğan fits into such a picture perfectly.

Indeed, Turkey’s message of European renewal has been gaining traction. Though the EU is effectively closed to new members, and Turkish accession will not be forthcoming, the country is suddenly being treated as a formidable power worthy of respect. After four years of Biden, during which European liberals paid lip service to combating authoritarianism and defending democracy, their sudden embrace of Erdoğan reveals more than just the extent of Turkey’s new relative power. That the Europeans must line up now to kiss the sultan’s ring demonstrates how swiftly the world has changed.

This isn’t, in fact, all that surprising. The more capitalism shatters traditional pieties, disregards frontiers and uproots whole communities, the more strident become the defenders of family, religion and fatherland. The more narratives of God, People and Nation are spurned as outdated, the more potently they return.

Those for whom identity is flexible confront those who know who they are only too well. For every Texan CEO knocking back free booze in the VIP lounges of airports, there’s a bearded patriarch with a rifle for whom the Other is to be found just over the river. There are some glamorous nightclubs in Istanbul, while around Mardin and Diyarbakir in the Kurdish south-east of Turkey people pray on the pavements and donkeys wander through filling stations.

Tradition and modernity are complicit as well as conflicting. A world of constant flux and restless innovation is in danger of eroding the values by which it legitimates itself. This wasn’t a problem for the Victorians, who despite the pace of social change and the clamour of the marketplace still clung to certain eternal verities. They were aware that you couldn’t legitimise what you did in purely secular, pragmatic terms, not least if it included herding people into slums and workhouses. Instead, there were certain foundational principles to which they could appeal, from the laws of God to the sanctity of the family and the supreme value of the individual.

Precepts like these were particularly important if you were trying to run an empire, a discreditable affair for which you need a whole raft of high-minded rationales. It’s true that there can be an embarrassing gap between your principles and your practice, as there is in today’s United States. Having spent the week bribing officials and shafting your competitors, you gather in church on Sunday morning to celebrate the metaphysical aspect of your existence. On the whole, however, the two sides of your life peacefully coexist, rather as Jacob Rees-Mogg is Victorian toff and modern entrepreneur in a single surreal person.

There are limits, however, to this coexistence. Sooner or later, the fluid, unstable, provisional nature of life in the shopping mall and marketplace is likely to infiltrate the moral sphere as well. It’s then that people begin to talk about postmodernism. Eternal verities drop away, and along with them the stout foundations on which you used to rely for defending your way of life. Talk of God, Progress and the Destiny of the Nation starts to sound hollow in the world of Tesco and Google. It served capitalism well in its earlier, more triumphalist phase, but it doesn’t ring true in the era of Britain’s Got Talent. Instead, moral values become relative and subjective: you may object to serial killing, but personally I find it a lot of fun. This kind of thing may be harmless among friends, but it’s no way to run a country. To do that, you need a firmer framework and a tighter consensus, not least at times of political or economic crisis. Yet what if you have just relativised all that out of existence? What if modern capitalism saws off the branch on which it is sitting?

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It’s at this point that turning to nationalism, populism, religion and traditional ethics has its appeal, whether in Ankara or Washington. It’s particularly attractive if you are confronting an enemy such as Islamism, which has no trouble at all with moral absolutes and metaphysical foundations. You don’t want to be left ideologically disarmed in this struggle, even if you’ve done most of the disarming yourself. So large patches of the globe shift towards authoritarianism, which isn’t necessarily the same as coercion. In the recent Turkish elections, for instance, millions of people have just consented to be coerced, or at least consented to a political regime which works in large measure by authoritarian means.

Like any other form of government, such regimes will only survive in the long run if they can persuade enough citizens to identify with them. People must feel that their identity is at stake in supporting this power. They must find themselves reflected in the Leader, as a child may see itself in the fond look of its parents. Because power, law and the state are abstractions, it’s easier to get people to internalise them if they take on tangible form. In autocratic states, power is incarnate in a single figure; but this means that some of the people might identify not with power itself but with the individual who represents it. To avoid this happening, Nature in its infinite wisdom has made a lot of those individuals either faceless or repulsive. Erdoğan, who looks like a harassed, slightly down-at-heel schoolteacher on the point of retirement, is an example of the former. Adolf Hitler was an ill-favoured little runt, Stalin looked like a crafty walrus and Mao was in sore need of a spell in the gym.

Most of these men were dictators, not just authoritarians, and the power of a dictator is absolute. The word “absolute” means free or unrestricted, which includes being unrestricted by circumstances. To say that torturing a baby is absolutely wrong is to say that it’s wrong irrespective of any circumstances you might specify in order to justify it. Absolute power is power which is in principle unconstrained. It may rein itself in, or even show mercy and compassion, but it does these things only when it feels like it.

Nietzsche believed that the Superman should treat ordinary folk with kindness, but he saw this as an act of condescension, not as a moral obligation. It is a form of sovereignty which rests entirely on itself, and is therefore arbitrary. If it had to appeal to law or custom or tradition to validate itself, these things would take precedence over it and it would cease to be absolute. Besides, there are no laws for how the law is to be established in the first place, which means that law has a close affinity with lawlessness. Many political set-ups rely for their stability on people coming to forget the blood and tears in which they were born.

Because absolute power is unrestrained, it can be hard to distinguish it from anarchy, even though it is often anarchy which it is out to suppress. The two are sides of the same coin. In Maurice Sendak’s children’s classic Where The Wild Things Are, the hero Max becomes king of the wild things, a phrase which contains a crucially ambiguous preposition (of). Does it mean that Max is king over the wild things or the wildest thing of all? The answer, needless to say, is both.

The absolute and the anarchic are also related in another sense. Absolutists are people who fear that the only alternative to rigid laws and precise regulations is total chaos. Unless you have a rule forbidding players to pass the ball back to the goalkeeper, then — key phrase — before you know where you are, all the players will be passing back to the goalie all the time and the game will never get started. One might call this the essence of the authoritarian mind-set. Allow people their freedom and they will abuse it. The fact that they aren’t really people without it is overlooked. How could you possibly have pavements on which people can walk in opposite directions at the same time? Everyone would obstruct everyone else and nobody would ever get anywhere.

It is logical, then, that Shakespeare’s autocratic Lear is accompanied throughout most of the play by the anarchic Fool. There is more than one sense in which the two are terrible twins. For one thing, anyone who wants to be a king must be a fool, at least in Shakespeare’s day. This is one reason why Lear is mad. Monarchs attract envy and aggression, which is why tribal chiefs in pre-modern societies are sometimes ritually beaten during their coronations. This didn’t happen to King Charles, but he still managed to look like a helpless victim throughout the ceremony, as a group of men around his throne kept doing things to him and he just had to sit there and take it.

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For another thing, the Fool’s debunkery strips the mask from his master’s authority, showing it to be just as arbitrary as his own antics. The problem with sovereignty is that, being perched on a height, it can’t see itself in the eyes of other people, and so can’t have its identity confirmed by them. This is why Lear begs for someone to tell him who he is. Without dialogue with others, selfhood simply implodes, which is another reason why Lear is mad. In one or two of his other plays, Shakespeare seeks to repair this situation by drawing on the legend of the ruler who moves incognito among the common people in order to learn about their daily lives. Today, minus the incognito, this is known as a walk-about.

Those who are driven mad by power in our own time aren’t so much kings or politicians as celebrities. Like Lear at the beginning of the play, they are told only what they want to hear, and thus see themselves mirrored everywhere they look. Only by encountering otherness can one know who one is, and thus retain a degree of sanity. Otherwise, like a certain famous entertainer, you will end up asking your assistants to stop the wind from blowing.

The 100th anniversary of the founding of the modern Turkish republic this year was supposed to mark Erdoğan’s crowning moment: the point at which he hoped his muscular regional power would assert its place on the world stage. But his plans for a triumphant centenary re-election were dealt a severe blow as a devastating earthquake ripped through south-eastern Turkey in February, killing more than 50,000 people.

The last time a similarly destructive earthquake hit, it was 1999 and Erdoğan was fresh out of prison, convicted of inciting religious hatred and banned from public office. He was deeply distrusted by the secular elite running the country, but he took the lead in lambasting those in authority for their callousness and incompetence in response to the earthquake. Capturing the public mood, he led his Islamist party to national election victory three years later.

This time, though it was his own authority which was shaken by allegations of catastrophic corruption in construction projects built on the cheap in the earthquake zone, while state institutions which he has made less independent were criticised for failing to respond when thousands of buildings collapsed.

Any government would have struggled to cope with a disaster on the scale of February’s earthquake, but Erdoğan was already presiding over an economy suffering rampant inflation – an annual rate of 85% as recently as October and still above 50% in March – as well as a currency in freefall.

So, he’s under pressure. The Justice and Development Party which he created and leads with unquestioned authority had been an election-winning machine. But now, in the presidential and parliamentary elections on May 14 (with a likely presidential run-off on May 28) he is facing the prospect of his first ever defeat.

And the rest of the world is watching closely. Turkey’s strategic location has always made it important, but it now matters more than ever, with Erdoğan playing both sides during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: last year, Turkey brokered a deal allowing the export of Ukrainian grain, seen as vital for world food supplies; it is a member of Nato with a large standing army, but unlike its allies it maintains many economic ties with Russia.

Turkey is also an important power in the Middle East with a sphere of influence it polices across its volatile borders with Syria and northern Iraq; and its complex relationship with Europe, on issues ranging from migration to trade to its long-stalled EU membership application, is ever-changing and unpredictable.

All in all, this is an election of massive geopolitical significance. The result matters far beyond Turkey’s own borders. And if Erdoğan loses, a smooth transfer of power will be a real test.

After two decades of unchallenged authority, he has become a controversial and divisive international figure, particularly in the West. But it’s easy to forget that this man now widely regarded — with good reason — as an illiberal autocrat, took office in 2003 promising democratic renewal. In his first two years as Prime Minister, he passed more democratic reforms than his predecessors had managed in two decades. He also made the country wealthier, taking control of the economy out of the hands of the armed forces and a small elite based in Istanbul. Across the country the economy grew quickly as obscure provincial cities, which voted for him in droves, developed into global centres of manufacturing. It was levelling up in action. It’s easy to understand his early appeal.

Abroad, too, his reputation grew. As an Islamist politician taking power after decades of secularist rule, he had an approach which many in the West initially welcomed: “Religion shouldn’t interfere with issues of government,” he told me at the time. “But government shouldn’t interfere with issues of religion either. That is the message we are trying to spread.”

With post-invasion chaos engulfing neighbouring Iraq in 2003, he offered an apparently compelling alternative. Tony Blair and other Western leaders saw him as welcome proof that liberal democracy and Islam could co-exist. In 2005, Turkey finally opened formal talks on membership of the European Union. But the West’s warm embrace grew cold — with Europe partly to blame.

Many of Erdoğan’s domestic critics had always been sceptical of his approach to religion, accusing him of having a far more hawkish Islamist agenda than he was given credit for, and of practising “takkiye” — the religiously sanctioned practice of concealing the truth in order to gain advantage for Islam. They watched nervously as restrictions on alcohol sales were imposed, an archaic ban on women wearing Islamic headscarves in public offices was lifted, and religion assumed a far more prominent role in public life.

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Erdoğan also began tapping into the nasty side of Turkish nationalism, once it emerged that Europe was not interested in putting his EU application on any kind of fast track. It quickly became clear, early on in the Erdogan era, that promises made by one generation of European politicians were being ignored by the next: Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel were far more sceptical about Turkey’s place in Europe. A divided Cyprus had also become part of the EU, and the Greek Cypriot government was determined to block Turkish membership at every turn, unless it regained control of the self-declared Turkish republic in the north of the island.

The net result was that Turkey’s membership bid had no chance of making any progress, and negotiations ground to a halt. Rejection in Europe angered Erdoğan and wounded his pride. His charm offensive came to an abrupt end. Instead, he adopted an us-against-the-world mentality, increasingly intolerant of any kind of opposition.

The big turning point in international attitudes came when a series of peaceful protests about the redevelopment of Gezi Park in Istanbul, which began 10 years ago this month, escalated into national anti-government demonstrations that were violently suppressed. Erdoğan responded by rallying his supporters and cracking down on his opponents. It soon became a matter of routine to imprison any critics, often on trumped-up charges. Increasing prosperity meant he continued to win elections, but the longer he stayed in power, the more confrontational he became.

The relationship with Europe deteriorated, becoming purely transactional, with the EU relying on Turkey to help stem the tide of tens of thousands of refugees and migrants arriving on European shores in 2015. And at the same time, Erdoğan abandoned his efforts to promote peace with the Kurdish rebel movement, the PKK, and launched a widespread military offensive in Kurdish areas. He said he was trying to suppress terrorism, but Kurdish political leaders were also treated as enemies of the state.

If he appeared increasingly paranoid, perhaps he had good reason to be. In 2016, Erdoğan narrowly survived a failed coup attempt led by a faction in the armed forces which claimed to be trying to protect democracy from his rule. Instead, it used air force jets to bomb parliament and sent tanks onto the streets of Istanbul. More than 250 people were killed.

Erdoğan’s response was a widespread purge: more repression, tens of thousands of arrests and a further crackdown on human rights. He also pushed through a change in the constitution, creating an all-powerful executive Presidency which he won with relative ease as his supporters responded to his call to protect the country from its enemies.

And now he sits in his palace of a thousand rooms, surrounded by the paraphernalia of power and reminders of the Ottoman Sultans of old, the great survivor plotting his next move. But he might not have many moves left to make. In the past, where Erdoğan has been ruthless, the opposition has been toothless – weak and divided. This year, though, squabbling opposition leaders have set aside their disagreements, sometimes through gritted teeth, to form a six-party alliance led by the mild-mannered veteran, Kemal Kiliçdaroğlu.

It includes liberals, nationalists and ultra-conservatives, while Turkey’s main pro-Kurdish party — which could win more than 10% of the parliamentary vote — has also urged its supporters to back Kılıçdaroğlu for President. It’s all part of a plan to replace one man rule with what his manifesto calls “a truly pluralistic democracy”, and the contrast with the bombastic Erdogan could not be more acute. One election advert saw Kılıçdaroğlu sitting in his humble kitchen fulminating about the price of onions.

Opinion polls generally show Kılıçdaroğlu slightly ahead of his rival, but the result will be close. The opposition has to ensure that it gets the vote out across the country, because the election itself – surprising as this may seem – should be relatively free. Ballot stuffing is not a Turkish tradition, and polling stations are closely monitored. Turnout is always impressively high. But while it may be free, it won’t be entirely fair. The President’s complete control of state institutions and his dominance of the media creates nothing close to a level playing field. And while his political base is smaller than it once was, it remains both substantial and incredibly loyal.

So, there is no question that Erdoğan could still win. His supporters are the millions of religious conservatives he has brought into the mainstream of Turkish life. They share his instincts, trust him to look after their interests, and revel in his bull-in-a-china-shop persona abroad. He also leans in to this strongman narrative. After two decades of political supremacy and mounting repression, he likes to play the tough guy and has the power to make things difficult. He has, for example, been holding up Swedish membership of Nato for months, angered by Sweden’s offer of sanctuary to Kurdish dissidents he describes as terrorists.

Equally, a recent video call with a friendly Vladimir Putin at the opening ceremony for a Russian-built nuclear power plant in southern Turkey, and an announcement that Turkish agents had killed the leader of Islamic State in northern Syria, were both designed to bolster Erdoğan’s image among voters at home.

But there is a real choice this time, and Kılıçdaroğlu has made it clear that he would do things differently. He says he wants to improve relations with the West, and restart negotiations on EU membership (although that could prove awkward in Brussels, where Ukraine’s application is top of the in-tray). More controversially, he wants to mend fences with Bashar Al-Assad in Syria as part of a plan to send millions of Syrian refugees back home.

If Kılıçdaroğlu wins, the world will watch to see what Erdoğan will do next. He has accumulated more power than any Turkish leader since the founding father Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and retiring gracefully has never been part of the plan.

That is another reason this election is so important. If a strongman can be beaten at the ballot box, it will send a powerful message that change is possible. Although some do fear a January 6 type protest from Erdoğan’s supporters if he should lose. Or a legal challenge if there’s a close result, in courts whose independence is already under scrutiny.

Erdogan’s interior minister has already spoken darkly about the election as a “political coup attempt backed by the West”. And the President will certainly try to do whatever it takes to win. His final campaign rallies have been littered with blunt patriotic warnings about enemies real and imagined, and belligerence has worked for him before.

But unusually, the election remains up for grabs. History in the making again, a hundred years on.