And it should serve as a warning about other places — including the Republican Party — where autocratic leaders, seemingly incompetent in many respects, are returning to power through democratic means. That’s not quite the way Erdogan’s close-but-comfortable victory in Sunday’s runoff over the former civil servant Kemal Kilicdaroglu is being described in many analyses. The president, they say, has spent 20 years in power tilting every conceivable scale in his favor. Erdogan has used regulatory means and abused the criminal-justice system to effectively control the news media. He has exercised his presidential power to deliver subsidies, tax cuts, cheap loans and other handouts to favored constituencies.

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Persons: Jean, François Revel, “, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, Erdogan, Ekrem Imamoglu Organizations: Republican Party — Locations: French, Turkey, Sunday’s, Turkish, Istanbul