Why Erdogan won

This was supposed to be the year when Recep Erdogan would finally come to grief. Instead, he has defied the odds and won today’s runoff in the Turkish presidential election with 52 per cent of the votes vs 48 per cent for 74-year-old opposition leader Kemal Kiliçdaroglu. This establishes Erdogan as one of the great political survivors, whose personal popularity has risen over the declining stature of his party. And it all but kills off the hope that reformist Turks had for change.