Tunisia's Islamist Government Agrees to Step Down After Mass Secular Protests, Election to Follow

[The Real]

Source that Western powers supported him over his opponent?

I don't have time to find the articles and post them, but they should be easily available through Google (or asking a Turkish person, if you know any.) His whole campaign ran on democracy and human rights, and he was easily the most popular candidate among Western powers. He even racked up UN awards during his time as mayor for his reforms and humanitarian policies, before the election.

This is a huge reach. Also, Erdogan never "turned" to the right in ideology. He was always an Islamist.

I don't think it's a reach at all. Erdogan definitely did change- he's not remotely the same politician he was when he first took office. I think that much is clear even from a cursory look at Turkish government and its policies during this interval. He did a complete turnaround on his initial pro-egalitarian/minority policies, etc. The turn to authoritarianism is something we've seen many times before. In this case, it was the result of his democratic ambitions turning against him, and the Iraq War empowering the Kurds an destabilizing the region was definitely a factor in that.

I don't think Erdogan isn't an Islamist, strictly speaking. He's more of a conservative "cultural Muslim," and even that is just fuel for Neo-Ottomanist nostalgic populism. He has a few Islamist sidemen, sure, but his own leanings aren't even moderate Islamist (ie Muslim Brotherhood style,) much less anything resembling full-blown Islamism. Really, his own position is relatively difficult to pin down. He didn't try to impose Islamic law when he was mayor of Istanbul, nor has he done so during his current tenure.

It really looks like you're reaching breh. I'll never understand the Leftist tendency to blame themselves for the backwardness of other countries or regimes.

I don't think this is simply a Leftist idea. Strictly speaking, any Burkean/traditional Conservative would agree here.

 

[TLOL is back]

I don't have time to find the articles and post them, but they should be easily available through Google (or asking a Turkish person, if you know any.)

I just googled it and found nothing.
https://www.google.com/#q=west+preferred+erdogan

I don't think it's a reach at all. Erdogan definitely did change- he's not remotely the same politician he was when he first took office. I think that much is clear even from a cursory look at Turkish government and its policies during this interval. He did a complete turnaround on his initial pro-egalitarian/minority policies, etc. The turn to authoritarianism is something we've seen many times before. In this case, it was the result of his democratic ambitions turning against him, and the Iraq War empowering the Kurds an destabilizing the region was definitely a factor in that.

Like I said, he may have changed in policy but not ideologically:

In the early 1990s, the young Erdogan was an Islamist politician in Istanbul, rising to become a successful mayor of the city who addressed practical problems of sanitation, water, and traffic congestion. He was then a junior member of an earlier Islamist party that had ruled briefly but was overthrown by a secular, military-led coup in 1998 that constituted yet another defeat for the Islamist movement. Erdogan himself was jailed for the offense of citing a militant Islamist poem.

http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/erdogan’s-grand-vision-rise-and-decline