> Turkey is not a democracy?

It's a democracy in terms of the electoral process, mostly... at least historically. Flawed, but the people select their leaders by election.

It's not really a democracy in terms of political culture and rights. Very weak free speech, right to organize, right to assemble, freedom of the press, etc. They jail a lot of journalists, on charges like "subliminal messages announcing the military coup."

Turkey has been a democracy for almost a century now.

However, it all comes down to this, what happens when people of a democratic country elect a president that has totalitarian tendencies?

This happens all the time, and the criticisms are, in my mind, directed at policy as much as anything about the people having “totalitarian tendencies.” In Muslim countries, in particular, like Turkey and Egypt, totalitarianism is usually invoked to keep out proponents of political Islam. Erdogan was replacing authoritarians who maintained Turkey’s secular regime against a religious populace. When Egypt’s dictator fell, the people replaced him with a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Then a military dictator toppled him to restore secularism.

On the paper, Turkiye is a democracy. In reality, since 1950's it was not. It is a dictatorship or oligarchy at best, funded by the big money of the world, mostly from the US. Rigged elections, placing puppet governments (like Tayyip) is an ongoing theme. At the time of election, people are given the impression of who they are electing as it is in a democracy, while the result is already known by the powers that be. Other than few military takeovers of the country since 1960, this country have never had fair and clear elections. Hence, Tayyip's puppet government has ben brought to action by the same powers that be, to decimate the Turkish armed forces, so, no more of those nasty military take-over actions can be repeated. Turkiye has turned into a Banana republic for what it is worth.

If Turkey is a puppet, who's holding the strings?

What does their export market and foreign currency reserves tell you? (I don't know myself, just suggesting the points of leverage.)

FX reserves tell us whatever every country's FX tell us. That countries have forex, gold and bond reserves to protect the value of their currency. It can also work in the opposite direction. India and US keep large sums of gold. Greece kept large sums of US govt. bonds (until 2008 market crash at which point they found out this was a bad idea).

Japan's Abe is famous for auctioning huge reserves of JPY in order to reduce the value of their currency and stock up on USD. Reduced currency value means their exports became temporarily cheaper and this way they got an artificial boost to their production industry.

This is a complex subject and doesn't show that "country X is the puppet of country Y", it rather shows how they like to strategize for their own benefit.

Their opinions on Turkey might be fair, but beware that Freedom House is basically an arm of the US State Department.

If you’re not going to contest their conclusions, what was the point of bringing that up?

Acknowledging bias is worthwhile even if the conclusion might be the same.

It’s also a good way to cast doubt on something indirectly, without having to explicitly enumerate any factual disagreements.

This is a GO masquerading as an NGO. A caveat lector is appropriate whenever someone brings them up.

I was with you until your used to word 'masquerading'. Nothing about Freedom House is a masquerade. If you don't share sources, then don't please write such things.

[edit] Can't reply below: Freedom House is NOT the State Department. They're a funder, but not the only one. So your description still in incorrect or requires sourcing.

They're masquerading in the sense that a newspaper will write 'According to NGO Freedom House...' rather than 'According to the US State Department'.

They're not masquerading in the sense that they try to hide where the money comes from, but to the majority that read their materials, this won't be apparent.

>>I was with you until your used to word 'masquerading'. Nothing about Freedom House is a masquerade.

If they are a government organization then the domain needs to be .gov.

.org gives the perception of NGO.

you can reply below; you just need to click on the post's time to get the post in a new page.

See also: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index

"Democracy is like a train: when you reach your destination, you get off" -- Erdogan

Edited for clarification.