Will this earthquake be Erdogan’s undoing?

ADIYAMAN, Turkey - Beneath each fresh mound in this rapidly expanding graveyard lies a tragedy. One morning at dawn, Zeki Karababa told me about his.

Karababa's brother, Hamit; Hamit's wife, Fatma; and two children, Ahmet, 10, and Evra, 3, had been crushed when their apartment building crumbled in the earthquake.

But that was just the beginning.

"For three days there were no professional rescuers," Karababa told me. By the time they found his relatives, all four were dead.

"I took the bodies with my bare hands," he said, weeping. "Nobody came to help us."

It is a refrain I heard over and over in the week I spent traversing southeastern Turkey last month. The country is struggling to recover from an earthquake whose wrath defies superlatives: 50,000 dead in Turkey and Syria and countless families homeless. The World Bank estimates that the quake...