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Notes -
Two things can be true: Turkish "democracy" may have always been democracy-with-an-asterisk. That asterisk being a Kemalist deep state willing to overthrow and jail opponents (like Erdogan) for being insufficiently secular. So a pretty big one.
Erdogan may be their chickens coming home to roost - hard to make the moral case for democratic restraint when the deep state and some of the more liberal Turks were fine with illiberalism to maintain their preferred status quo against the broadly Islamist populace (similarly, "liberals" in Egypt reacted...badly to Morsi).
But that doesn't mean that Erdogan isn't an autocrat now or that he's good for Turkey.
Yes this is pretty much spot on. One man increasingly making almost every single decision and taking personal control of almost every patronage network in a diverse country of ~80 million for 25 years has had quite disastrous consequences no matter what one thinks about his opponents.
Ironically, his main victim has been the center-right/conservative/Islamist-ish* political movements. He totally hollowed the organizations out and blocked the paths of succession for talented people in favor of his own syncopates.
*always good to keep in mind there are very few Islamists in Turkey in the Salafist sense, and these people typically consider Erdogan also an absolute degenerate enemy of the true faith.
I meant it in a much broader sense: relative to laicite especially, so many Muslims would count as "Islamist" . They don't actually have to be a crazy Salafist type or even the state-opposing Muslim Brotherhood types.
TBH the whole term is a fraught one, partly because it's a tempting way for Westerners to criticize Muslims while claiming to not criticize Islam-as-such, and to apply Protestant assumptions to Islam - obviously the "right" sort of Islam wouldn't be so politically problematic (even though a lot of inconvenient things in Islam are just part of general doctrine).
Erdogan's magic with regards to Islamism was to take over the Muslim Brotherhood type Milli Görüş movement which was making large sections of the population as well as the elite rather uncomfortable at the time, and merge it with the more folksy traditional Islam of the population, liberal pro-EU currents, as well as the dominant center-right capitalist developmentalist tradition of Turkish politics.
Later on he did one more pivot and moved to a type of Islam that the rulers of the Ottoman Empire would be very familiar with, where protecting the religion is the source of the state's legitimacy, and in exchange the state gets the power to define what religion means. This could take on very radical forms, as even implementing laicite can be an act of upholding the religion if the state determines this is what it will take to protect the community of believers(Obligatory photo of Ataturk praying with the muftis and imams at the opening of the first Parliament of Ankara). After all, what does Islam even mean if the Muslims are not strong enough to keep existing? Currently this is what Erdogan-style Islamism ended up transforming into. However the problem with such a model is that it is also quite despotic and spiritually empty, which are two problems Ottomans also often struggled with.
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