How Turkey Lost Its Freedom — and Even Its Bread

Mustafa AkyolTheHuman Freedom Index 2021 just came out. It shows a  concerning decline in freedom in countries where 83 percent of the global population lives. Among these, there are five countries whose trajectories in the past ten years are the worst of all. These are Syria, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bahrain, and my home country, Turkey.The graph above, adapted from theHuman Freedom Index, puts Turkey ’s tragic decline visually: in 2009, Turkey ranked 83rd on the index. In ten years, it declined to 139th place. It is a  remarkably downhill slide.How did this happen? How did Turkey lose its freedom so dramatically?The answer has lots to do with the man who has ruled Turkey in an increasingly single ‐​handed way in the past decade: President Tayyip Erdogan, the leader of the Justice and Development Party (AKP.) But there is also something curious. Erdogan and the AKP have been in power since 2002. This implies that they must have been doing not too badly in their earlier years. In fact, the graph above even shows an uphill trend from 2008 to 2009. (Other measures of global freedom that go earlier than 2008, such as by Freedom House, also shows a slight uphill trend in Turkey in the early 2000s, and then at least no decline until 2010.)So, it seems that the decline of freedom in Turkey did not immediately begin with the AKP rule in 2002. It began rather inthe second phase of AKP rule after 2010. How did that happen?The answer is complex, but here it is in a  nutshell: Th...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs