"Erdoğan's centralization of power in his own hands, it didn't happen in one day. In the 20 years he's been in power, he has taken incremental steps, and there was no Rubicon really. When he first came to power in 2002, he was in a weak position."
"So he pitched himself as the guy who was going to fix Turkey's broken Democracy, and that meant sidelining the secularist military. And he framed that goal as part of his democratic agenda, and that's how he was able to put together a coalition of liberals, for instance. His support went way beyond the narrow Islamist space. He managed to appeal to the country's Turks, Kurds, conservatives, progressives, even social democrats. And I think that was a brilliant idea."