Last week, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s Islamist president, arrested a political rival. That sparked several days of protest, and, today, it’s seemingly culminated with protestors invading the presidential palace. The big question is whether this ends with a brutal response or the end of Erdoğan’s reign. Obviously, I have no answer to that question, but I can provide a little, very superficial background to help make some sense of what’s happening in Turkey today.

Today’s Turkey is the remnant of the once formidable Ottoman Empire, which, at its peak in 1683, before it was beaten back at the Gates of Vienna, controlled vast swaths of central Europe and the Middle East for hundreds of years:

Image by Chamboz. CC B-SA 4.0.

By 1914, the Ottoman Empire was a weak shadow of its former greatness. It signed its death warrant when it sided with the Germans at the start of World War I. At war’s end, the winning parties sliced up the former Ottoman territories, creating borders without regard for tribal loyalties, thereby initiating many of the problems we see today in the modern Middle East.

In 1923, after beating back the WWI powers that sought to control entirely the rump of the Ottoman Empire, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk became president of the newly designated Turkish Republic. Once in power, he embarked on a secularizing program. Under the regime Atatürk established, Turkey was a conservative country with Muslims, but it was not a Muslim country.

All that changed once Erdoğan consolidated power.

The 71-year-old Erdogan has been involved in Turkish politics for almost fifty years, beginning when he joined an anti-communist student group in 1976. He allied that with joining the Islamist National Salvation Party, which lasted until a 1980 military coup in Turkey dissolved all major political parties.

When parties were reinstated in 1983, Erdoğan went right back to becoming involved in Islamic nationalism—that is, returning Turkey to its Muslim roots. He was politically successful, rising from office to office while always pushing for Muslim nationalism. His base was conservative Muslims anxious to turn back the clock on secularizing reforms.

From 1994-1997, Erdoğan was Mayor of Istanbul. That stint ended when he was convicted for trying to sneak Islam back into Turkish politics. As with so many revolutionaries, that didn’t stop Erdoğan. He went right back to pushing for Muslim nationalism, eventually becoming a party leader. In 2002, Erdoğan’s party won the majority of seats in Parliament, making him the prime minister. Then, in 2014, Erdoğan won the presidency and has held the office since then.

Over the years, Erdoğan’s rule has become increasingly authoritarian (moving from relatively liberal in his early premiership to tyrannical as he consolidated power), and he’s been a thorn in the side of both America and Israel. Famously, when he was still mayor, Erdoğan said, “Democracy is like a train: when we reach our destination, we get off.”

Erdoğan got off that train hard and fast last week when the judiciary, which he controls, ordered the arrest of his top opponent in the upcoming presidential elections. This is, of course, a familiar totalitarian practice. We’ve seen it recently in Brazil and Romania, and if the Democrats had had their way, we would have seen it in America.

The Turkish people erupted in massive street demonstrations, which were met with hundreds of arrests. The crowds are impressive:

If that report is true, it’s a signal that Erdoğan’s hold on power is extremely tenuous. It remains to be seen how far the military and police will back him. It’s also not clear at this point if he’ll hold firm, back down a bit, or simply cut and run.

And what about Ekrem Imamoglu, who seems to have a huge following and could take away Erdoğan’s presidency should Erdoğan retreat and allow an actual election? He is, apparently, popular and charming. People in Istanbul like him because he’s cleaned up the Golden Horn, given milk to children, provided education scholarships, and upgraded the city’s decaying infrastructure, all of which is good, populist stuff. He’s also criticized both Hamas and Israel, which is a rare level of even-handedness from a Muslim leader.

Frankly, I have no idea whether Imamoglu would be better for America than Erdoğan. It’s quite possible that he won’t be worse.

And that is my super-quick, incredibly shallow rundown of a deeply complex man living in a complicated region that sits now, as it has for centuries, at the center of the divide between East and West, North and South.

Image: X screen grab.