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Results of any election are never representative of the entire population. That's the nature of democracy. If you have 99.999% of the population voting for the same person (like in Saddam's Iraq), then it's obvious the election was a sham. Democracy is all about the majority getting to choose the leaders.

As for repression, Erdogan didn't do that all by himself. Autocrats like that persist because they have a power structure under them that supports them and keeps them in power. In a democratic country like Turkey, this is supported by the people voting to keep these power structures in place. In short, the majority of the people there do support him. Yeah, it sucks that he repressed minorities, but that's one of the dangers of democracy: if the majority doesn't care about protecting minorities and their civil rights, then the minorities get stomped on. The only thing that makes a democratic system better than a completely autocratic system (like North Korea) is that at least in the democracy, there's a chance the majority will protect the minorities, and whatever institutions have been built in the system of government to do so and prevent leaders from having too much power. But as Turkey shows, and also in Germany in the 1930s, it sometimes falls apart, mainly because the people allow it to.




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