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Podcast: The Lede
Episode: Why Erdogan Wins Elections — with Nicholas Danforth and Kareem Shaheen
Description: Back in the early 2010s, then-Prime Minister of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogan presented himself as a peacemaker in the long war between Kurdish rebels and the state.
“He talked about what a tragedy it was that Turkish and Kurdish mothers were both reading the same Islamic prayers over the bodies of their fallen sons,” says Nicholas Danforth, a nonresident fellow at the Hellenic Foundation for European Foreign Policy and the author of “The Remaking of Republican Turkey: Memory and Modernity Since the Fall of the Ottoman Empire.”
“He saw the conflict between the T...