This is a really poor criticism of Erdoğan. He DOES deserve criticism, but here are the problems with the article:
Condoleezza Rice, claimed in 2007 that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) was pulling Turkey towards Europe. ... The optimists, alas, were poor prophets.
Turkey's aspirations to join the EU were met with strong rejection. The Pope himself publicly intervened and literally said Turkey must never be allowed to join the EU because it's a Muslim country.
Turkey still has interest in joining the EU, but the process is very slow.
Turkey has since been relentlessly moving backward, tearing down what Atatürk created in the 1920s when he separated religion from government, made public education secular and urged women to play a role equal to men’s.
So he's tearing down the Republic of Turkey? Really? Did Erdoğan move to stop women from voting or something? Is public education no longer secular?
Rather than a secular democracy, Erdogan is turning his country into an Islam-tilted dictatorship.
How?
Perhaps as a way of justifying his own sense of grandeur, he has tried to teach Turks to revere the achievements of the Ottoman Empire and its six centuries of rule, which ended in 1922. “We were born and raised on the land that is the legacy of the Ottoman Empire,” he likes to say.
The Ottoman Empire is an inseparable part of Turkey's cultural and historical legacy. It's the only reason why the modern state of Turkey exists. It's not Erdoğan's personal belief. It's an attitude shared by millions of Turks.
Imagine if the USSR had become the world's dominant power after WWII and Great Britain, whose monarchical system of is not secular because the Royal Crown claims to have derived its power from the authority of God and has its own church (The Church of England), were rebuilt under a staunch "secular", militaristic leader who promised to modernize the country and forced all English people to write in Cyrillic because Cyrillic is more "modern" and will help free the population from the grip of Christianity. This maniacal leader named himself "Our Father" and his government decreed that all good Soviet Britons in public schools must stand before a statue of Our Father and swear to be good soviet citizens. Fast forward several decades later and find British people saying, "We once had a great empire. The Soviet government deprives us of our cultural legacy and separates us from our religion. We want to go back to our old alphabet, which all our literature was written in."
In the course of renewing the low-ranked education system, Erdogan has directed schools to teach the old Ottoman version of Turkish, written in Arabic script.
This is a good policy.
Erdogan wants classes in Islam for first-graders who are Muslim.
Again, this is a good policy. In a country that's like 90% Muslim, kids should know something about their own religion. Even if they aren't practicing Muslims, understanding Islam is an important part of understanding many elements of their society and history. It also saves the poor kids from being radicalized by fundamentalist mullahs who do not have the interests of the nation at heart.
In 2013 his government put through a law banning alcohol in public places between 10 p..m and 6 a.m.
Also a good policy. Probably drastically cut drunk driving deaths too.
The coup, he claimed, was the work of his once close friend and now enemy, Fethullah Gülen, a former imam who left Turkey in 1999 and now lives in Pennsylvania.
The Erdoğan government actually did defend itself from a coup attempt. Turkish governments in the past have been overthrown by coups several times. This time it's noteworthy because democracy was upheld and the coup failed. Güllnism is a weird religious cult. Güllen is not your harmless pro-democracy leader exiled for loving freedom and secularism.