I'm living in Istanbul at the moment for a while. There's a substantial number of Turks who are rather western in outlook and very worried about the way things are going. Unfortunately since I'm from Zimbabwe I find it difficult to be hopeful about such situations.
The fact that such a man has been allowed to get into power there at all is odd and one wonders how such a state of affairs which shouldn't happen at all could ever flip the other way. A lot of people would suddenly have to become wiser and that didn't happen back home so I'm not sure how it will happen here.
Rather snowy at the moment, isn't it?
Erdoğan was the mayor of Istanbul and initiated the vast public transportation infrastructure programme. He has raised mean incomes a huge amount over the last 15 years (albeit on cheap foreign credit). He is also behaving like the Sultans of the 19th Century - paying lip service to tanzimat - modernisation - whilst allegedly feathering his own nest and developing rampant cronyism. ('England' was instrumental in removing some Sultans in those days, such was our power). Unfortunately the opposition parties are in disarray and between them split the vote so that AKP will always prevail. The Military have lost the legislative backing that allowed them to 'intervene' and a large number of Lt Cols - 4 Stars were locked up over the last few years on bogus allegations of coup plotting (and planning attacks on shopping malls, inter alia) in the 'Sledgehammer' plot. The result is that the Turkish General Staff seems to lack any guts and drive, and has no appetite for cross-border raids, given that 75% of their manpower are still conscripts.
The US and UK arming the Kurds would be akin to the UK agreeing for France and Germany, let's say, arming PIRA to conduct operations against a theocratic regime in Eire. Whereas the UK would have been happy in years gone by if the Irish Government had eliminated the PIRA threat.
Young educated Middle Class Turks want to move to the west, but at the same time they are 'rediscovering' their Islamic roots. I recently went to lunch with a group of senior Turkish officials; in the past wine would have been served - now it was Ayran - curdled butter-milk. Yum!