Authoritarianism

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan congratulated his Azerbaijani counterpart, Ilham Aliyev, on Wednesday for securing a fifth consecutive term in elections.

The past year showed that the future of humanity is in the hands of the voters of democratic countries. This year will show which way we are headed. We know how autocratic regimes behave and what their aims are. The great challenges of our time demand virtues that only the voters of free nations can appreciate and choose.

Azerbaijan's ruling party on Friday nominated incumbent President Ilham Aliyev for re-election next year, a move expected to extend the decades-long rule of the Aliyev family.

The 61-year-old has governed the energy-rich country since 2003, when he succeeded his father, Heydar, a former KGB officer and Communist-era boss.

As a millennial, I learned about the Athens Polytechnic Uprising in a rather quiet manner, through books and from two or three trusted people who were there. I read poems about it and listened to songs; I went to events that had an emotional impact.

Since 1992, Francis Fukuyama has often been called upon to explain how his prediction of the definitive dominance of the liberal democracy model after the fall of communism has been tested by events - by the internal convulsions in Western democracies and by the apparent success of authoritarian regimes such as China. But his theory has never lost its appeal.

LGBT groups are readying to resist the pressures and bans of Erdogan's government - but the autocratic President looks determined to crack down even harder on a vulnerable segment of society.

Reports written by Albanian academics who were allowed to travel abroad and official documents detailing students' nonconformist tendencies show that some citizens were critical of the country's authoritarian communist-era regime.

Two opposing visions for Turkey's future are on the ballot when voters return to the polls Sunday for a runoff presidential election that will decide between an increasingly authoritarian incumbent and a challenger who has pledged to restore democracy.

"It is again confirmed that we do not know ourselves and that we take our fantasies for real," a Turkish friend wrote to me on Monday. It is difficult to feel just how much many Turks hoped that, at last, they would see an end to the slide towards greater autocracy and towards greater distance from the European Union. 

President Tayyip Erdogan's opponents say they will repair the damage done to human rights during his rule, promising a new era for democracy and freedoms if he loses power in an election on Sunday.