Why it depresses me to see how modern day democracies are subverted by autocrats

It's another dark era for democracy in Turkey.

EXCERPTS from a CNN opinion article:

...But to understand really what comes next, it’s worth looking at how Erdogan laid the ground for this election. In power for two decades — first as prime minister and then as president — he has emerged as one of the most wily and repressive strongmen ruling today.

Erdogan markets himself as the champion of Muslims everywhere, building mosques and Islamic schools around the world, but he represses his own people if they dare to oppose him.

Turkey still reels from the purge of society sparked by the 2016 attempted military coup. In the fallout, more than 332,000 people were detained between 2016 and 2022, and tens of thousands remain in jail, according to the Turkish Interior Ministry’s own statistics from 2022.

Erdogan, of course, denies he is an autocrat. “Would a dictator ever enter a runoff election?” he asked CNN’s Becky Anderson just before the election. In the 21st century, the answer is yes.

Today authoritarianism works differently. Electoral autocracy is the name for the modern-day version in which elections are held but the field of competition is gamed from the beginning, so the results are far more likely to come out the way the government needs them to. FULL STORY from CNN