Power has gone to President Erdogan’s head and Turkey suffers consequences

This toxic, Islamophobic relationship has far more chance of sending Turkey into the dark ages than Islam ever had, writes Victoria White

DON’T believe a word I read about Turkey in the Western press anymore. And there’ll be lots of them this weekend as the G20 kicks off on in the Turkish coastal resort of Antalya. The country is on the frontier of some of the biggest humanitarian and security challenges the world faces, after all. It has also just elected into office to rule alone the AK Party whose reviled face in the West is President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

To read some of the liberal Western press you would swear Erdogan was an Islamic fundamentalist who had dragged a progressive, secular republic into the dark ages. “Turkey’s going the way Egypt went”, announced one of my friends a while ago. It was a telling comment, particularly as the West supported the coup against the democratically elected Egyptian government of the Muslim Brotherhood. You can have too much democracy, after all.