Tyrant or steadying hand?The Erdogan era is about to enter its next stage ON A rainy Sunday evening Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was delivering a fiery speech full of references to the glories of Islam and Turkey’s Ottoman past when a woman on a stretcher was lifted to the podium. He knelt down, took her hand and offered comfort. “Allahu akbar [Allah is great],” she screamed. A s