Turks are hungry for fairy tales. Any feel-good news propaganda—including Erdoğan’s “The West, including the Germans, are jealous of us!” tirade—finds millions of receptive listeners in Turkey’s postmodern marketplace of absurdity.

Revelations on YouTube by Turkish mob boss and Erdoğan ally Sedat Peker are rattling the Turkish government. Peker’s disclosures involve murder, rape, corruption, bribery, political assassination, drug smuggling, arms shipments to jihadists, and torture and violence committed on the government’s behalf to silence the opposition. Through Peker’s revelations, the Turkish people are witnessing the extent to which the Islamist “deep state” has exponentially flourished under Erdoğan’s rule.

Power fatigue per se does not fully explain the decline of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. He will have a hard time uniting a majority of Turks around the flag and the mosque in the presidential elections of 2023.

The departure of some Turks from Erdoğan-style manifest Islamism based on visible piety instead of spiritual and moral piety probably means their departure from Erdoğan’s voter base.

Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan needed a military success story, and the rescue of 13 hostages held by the PKK in northern Iraq would have fit the bill. Unfortunately, the operation was a tragic failure. Erdoğan now accuses the Kurds, Kurdish political parties, opposition parties, and even the Biden administration of responsibility for the disaster.

Turks have been seeking to modernize their democratic culture for a century and a half. Recently, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan pledged to reform the constitution. Beware of an Erdoğan bearing democratic gifts.

The success stories of Turkish Nobel laureate Aziz Sancar and the Turkish couple who developed a vaccine for the COVID-19 virus demonstrate that Turks are capable of spectacular achievements—provided they conduct their academic careers in the free world, not in a country strangled by an increasingly Islamist regime.

Studies have shown that only 2.4% of Turks believe their country’s biggest problem is its democratic deficit. Advanced democratic standards, or the acute lack of them, have never been a game changer in any Turkish election. In other words, democracy does not sell in the Turkish market.

Rumors are circulating that an Israeli-Turkish rapprochement might occur soon. Jerusalem and other regional capitals should not fall yet again for Ankara’s deceptions.

Turkey’s F-16s will be phased out in 10 to 15 years. Now that it has been kicked out of the US-led F-35 program and is facing US military sanctions, what can Ankara do to sustain aerial firepower? A Russian fighter seems the only feasible option, but even that may come too late.