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Erdogan Spins European Criticism Into Election Gold

Apr 18, 2017 | 00:39 GMT

The West's disapproval helped the Turkish president tap a nationalist vein and carry his constitutional victory.

Turkish supporters of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan gather at the Presidential Palace in Ankara following the victory of a constitutional reform package that will greatly expand the president's powers.

(ELIF SOGUT/Getty Images)

Turkey's interactions with the West follow a peculiar cycle. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan takes steps to consolidate power, intertwining the fate of the Turkish Republic with his own political destiny. The West follows with a condemnation of Turkey's authoritarian drift, lamenting the country's abandonment of its more enlightened European roots. Turkey, in turn, capitalizes by spinning those lectures into a Western plot to keep Turkey down, handing Erdogan a fresh supply of nationalist ammunition with which he can entrench support among the half of the Turkish population that still looks adoringly at him as a sultan rather than a despot....

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