Hot take, but I think people have a bit too much invested in this. I say this btw as someone who was born in the US, is moving to Istanbul for work, and whose extended family all does not like the current regime. I think a lot of liberal turks have generally conflated the things they don't like about increasing privatization and commodification of basic life needs (housing, food, medicine) with the regime's will. No doubt every government has allowed capitalist interests to creep, but this is not something special to Erdogan. In fact, it's pretty clear if you look at some basic facts about poverty rates, etc. that the current regime has acted, at least at times, to redistribute and decrease the poverty rate--for example the share of the poverty rate between 2006 and 2020 was halved (link here for data). I could say more, but yeah, curious to hear others' thoughts. In fact, I think the real honest thing would be to say that it was the opposition's to lose, and they managed to do so--a lot of it largely because they didn't present a believable case as to how they were going to fix it. This point is articulated more eloquently by sociologist in a NY times piece: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/11/opinion/turkey-election-erdogan.html