My cousin went to Turkey last year with her boyfriend, she said she would love to go back..I wonder if she would want to go back now
Turkey is still a great place to visit - great food, beautiful climate and crystal blue water along the Southern/Southwestern coasts.
Erdogan’s AKP party came to power with a moderate mask on, and got reelected twice on a rising economy (from printing money and instituting many of the conomic reforms recommended to join the EU).
Their agenda has been to transform their society into an Islamist country. They have purged the military and courts, rewrote the constitution twice, inculcated the school system with Islamist ideology, and imposed some of the world’s most oppressive press restrictions - more journalists are in jail there for what they wrote, than in China and Iran combined - some with sentences of over 1,000 years. Many Turks are not in favor of the reversal of Attaturk’s secular reforms, but the economy was growing gangbusters (more recently, growth has slowed).
Erdogan has been active in trying to export Islamist revolution, and to restore the caliphate, which the Turks used to rule. He came in on a platform of friendly relations with all neighbors, and now has Turkey mired hip deep in multipe hostile confrontations with mass casualties (of their surrogates, not Turks themselves) like Syria and Iraq. He is a tight ally of the Muslim Brotherhood, and their Turkish chapter, IHH, was behind the MV Mavi Mamara’s attempt to break the Gaza naval blockade, leading to something like 8 deaths. They are stating that they intend to do it again, but this time with Turkish Naval escort.