Nearly a decade ago, I was in Turkey for their election, and got to witness the spectacle of such a contest.  What I learned was that just as our elections have consequences for other countries, the reverse can also be true.  Here’s what is happening in this Turkish election, and why it matters for Americans.

First of all, to understand Turkish politics, you’ve got to understand Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the populist elected prime minister whose party AKP has had a hammerlock on the country’s parliament, and has used that to make himself an authoritarian president, a formerly ceremonial post until he rammed through a questionable referendum gave him unprecedented power.  He’s taken the country from a partly free bright spot in the Middle East to an autocracy according to the human rights group Freedom House.

John A. Tures is a professor of political science at LaGrange College in Georgia. He can be reached at jtures@lagrange.edu. His Twitter account is @JohnTures2.