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The Paranoid Style in Turkish Politics
(Wall Street Journal) Editorial - Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan's government is venting its paranoid side, sentencing dozens of opponents to lengthy prison terms as part of a conspiracy case unworthy of a democratic state. The government has imprisoned hundreds of people it claims are part of the plot, many of them senior military officers but also journalists, lawyers and members of parliament. For years, Turkey was a model of a Muslim country that could separate mosque from state. Under Erdogan, it might have also become a model of an Islamic democracy, hostile neither to religion nor modernity. With Monday's verdicts, it looks like something more depressingly familiar to the Middle East: a state where the fate of its citizens depends on the whims of the strongman.