- Recep Tayyip Erdogan came to power when the leftist prime minister before him failed to deal with the frustration of the masses that were crushed under a devastating economic crisis.

- He was intelligent enough to employ the solutions people smarter than him came up with to stabilize the Turkish economy. The purchasing power of the average citizen increased massively under his administration and the inflation dropped considerably. This gave him an image of a competent leader who could feed his people, which was, up until 2020, was one of his strongest points.

- He amended the constitution several times by holding referendums that were intended to help him consadilate his power and make Islamism more culturally and instituionally prominent.

- He forced all military officers, judges and porsecutors that oppose him to retire, and placed his cronies in those positions.

- He worked with big companies to take over the mainstream media.

- He started to culturally revitalize the iconography of a dead empire that the modern nation-state he's ruling now used to be a part of.

- He made his two sons-in-law hella rich through nepotism and embezzlement.

- He heavily restricted the academic autonomy of universities and began to personally appoint rectors.

- His voter base is mostly made up of old and formally uneducated people who either live in rural areas or originate from there and have a resenment towards city life. They don't use the internet, and their only source of information is the media that is owned by the AKP.

- In 2018, six opposition parties banded together to form an alliance. This alliance included parties from all sides of the political spectrum. From social democrats, to liberals, to secular right-wing nationalists, to Islamists. The alliance could not gain the trust of the public, for they were too busy arguing which side is going to get which ministry, and thus they lost the 2023 elections.

- Erdogan is now going after the LGBT community.

- Hundreds of thousands of young Turks flee from Turkey to escape Erdogan's dictatorship.

- Just like this subreddit, r/Turkey only represents the  of Turkish society that is young, curious, educated, secular and extremely critical of Erdogan.

- We are viewed as the black ship of Europe (%5 of our soil is in the European territory, which technically makes us a "European country" in part, by the definition of the EU.)

- And people constantly make unfunny jokes about the name of our country...

So, you are not alone, Comrades. Let's hug and weep together, and hope that one day we will both liberate ourselves from the lies of demagouges. I love you, take care.