Turkey’s Cleavage Crackdown Goes to College

I hate to admit it, but the paranoid secularists who for a decade have been saying Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan harbored a secret agenda are being proved right.
For years I’ve been gently pointing out to paranoid secularists that Erdogan has been in power a long time already, and if he was really hiding an Islamist master plan — as opposed to his declared conservative agenda — he was doing a good job.

Besides, didn’t you hear the man tell Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood leaders they needed a secular state and constitution? (They wouldn’t now be wearing white jumpsuits in jail if they’d listened to him.)
I used to say Erdogan might have a majoritarian view of democracy and no regard for the civil rights of opponents, but he’s way too smart a politician to break up the coalition of ex-Islamist conservatives, nationalists and liberals that made him powerful. The partnership enabled the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) to capture 50 percent of the vote in 2011, up from the 21 percent its Islamist predecessor, the Welfare Party, won at its peak in 1995.
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