When Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party won an overwhelming victory in Turkey’s November 2002 parliamentary elections, giving an Islamist party a supermajority for the first time in modern Turkish history, Erdogan took pains to assure those who worried where he might take the country. “Secularism is the protector of all beliefs and religions. We are the guarantors of this secularism, and our management will clearly prove that,” he told American reporters.

There was sharp divergence, however, between what he told diplomats and the agenda which he slowly undertook. He replaced technocrats with Islamists within the financial and auditing sector, moved to interject religion into education, and changed fundamentally Turkey’s foreign policy direction. Some leaders try to win the battle of ideas; Erdogan was never able to do this as he neither had the intellectual capability to win his opponents over nor the respect for democracy to compromise.