It could be said some are going overboard in supporting Erdogan as the “democratically elected” president against the military coup–as if he represented the voice of the Turkish people in their majority.

His August 2014 election was laden with controversies & charges of corruption. Umpteen serious charges of irregularities came not just from Erdogan’s political opposition but from international observers. It can hardly be said he’s democratically elected unless one claims that arrant corruption is part & parcel of modern electoral politics. To an extreme degree.

There are outright goofy analyses of Turkey’s “bourgeois democracy” under Erdogan versus a military junta. It’s one thing to stand with the Turkish people who fought back a military takeover because of the violence it would surely usher in. It’s quite another to pretend the violent, repressive Erdogan regime is any kind of democracy.