Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s near omnipotent president after three terms as prime minister — a post he has abolished — may be the most successful politician in the world. His politics and personality divide Turkey. But he is unquestionably a class act.
This month alone he got the better of US president Donald Trump— who allowed a third Turkish incursion in three years into Syria — and held his own with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, with whose military Turkey, a Nato member, will be patrolling its new Syrian buffer against US-backed Kurdish militia.
Hannah Lucinda Smith, who began visiting Turkey when Syria’s rebellion started in 2011, stayed on as correspondent for The Times and recognised the spell of this “smart political operator who was refining his brand of populism a decade and a half before Donald Trump cottoned on”. An engagingly written and factually scrupulous portrait is the happy result.