MANY Turks are worried and angry. Their country seems to be changing for the worse. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, arguably their most remarkable politician since the Republic’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, is no longer the sure-footed leader who took power 17 years ago. The man who dared to make peace with Kurdish rebels, who restored language, cultural and political rights to this significant majority, who promised an inclusive politics led by his moderate Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) and who oversaw a boom in overseas investment and major infrastructural projects, looks increasingly beleaguered and out of ideas.

The well-educated middle classes welcomed his arrival after years of venal and bickering politics. They remembered his four years to 1998 as an impressive mayor of Istanbul. Erdogan ran the country’s major commercial city efficiently. Corruption which has disfigured local politics largely disappeared. But that bourgeois support has melted away as Erdogan’s rule has decayed into the same corruption, nepotism and political fixes against which the man himself once set his face.

Too long in power, rattling round his grandiose one thousand-room presidential palace in Ankara, Erdogan has become increasingly intolerant of dissent, even among his once-trusted political allies. By cozying up to Russia’s Vladimir Putin and buying Moscow’s missiles, he has effectively trashed Turkey’s NATO membership and its relations with the United States. By choosing to open Turkey as a refuge for the Muslim Brotherhood, the political front for fundamentalist terrorism, he has alienated much of the Arab world that has been battling this menace. And by scrapping his deal with the Kurds, clamping down on their elected politicians and muzzling and intimidating press and media, the Erdogan liberal political vision has been abandoned.