Erdogan’s Turkey at a crossroads

ISTANBUL - "Our country is finally blessed with a period of four-and-a-half years without electoral disputes," Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan trumpeted some two weeks ago, addressing a crowd of public servants in Ankara. "It is now time to leave all tensions behind, embrace our opponents and focus on the challenges for the economy, security and stability of our country," he added, before the assembled crowd broke out in ceremonial applause.

Two days later and just a few kilometres away from where the Turkish president's podium had been standing, the leader of the country's biggest opposition party, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, came under a barrage of vicious punches from a nationalist mob, during the funeral of a soldier who fell in a battle against Kurdish paramilitary forces.
For weeks now, Turkey has been oscillating between two parallel realities: a disputed...