Turkey has fallen hostage to the ambition of one man: President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. After voters in June stripped the ruling Justice and Development party of its majority, denying the neo-Islamist AKP a fourth triumph, he has all but hijacked the country into a new general election.

The June result delivered a hung parliament. But its message was that a clear majority of Turks do not want one-man rule. Since ascending to what had been a largely ceremonial office last year, President Erdogan has already grabbed power from parliament, cabinet and institutions such as the judiciary. His avowed aim was to win a supermajority for the AKP in order to recast the constitution around his overweening taste for unbridled power.

No matter that the country he has done much to polarise is assailed on all fronts: menaced from its southern border by Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant), which last month began attacks inside Turkey; facing reignited fighting in the mainly Kurdish south-east; and with a stagnating economy and falling currency vulnerable to short-term capital flows amid deep uncertainty in emerging markets.

Ruling like a capricious sultan from his kitsch new neo-Ottoman palace four times the size of Versailles, he seems to incarnate the spirit of the remark attributed to Louis XV: apres moi, le deluge.

Many Turkish observers of this mercurial leader, including some within the AKP orbit, believe he decided on a re-run of the election almost as soon as the June results came in. Paternalist to a fault, he appears to believe Turks gave the wrong answer and would have to sit the test again. They would soon see that Turkey’s maladies arise from their failure to stick with one-party government under a strong president.

Erdogan said earlier this month that power had already migrated from Turkey’s parliamentary system into his presidency. “There is a president with de facto power in the country, not a symbolic one”.

The president is acting within his constitutional remit in calling new elections, since the AKP failed to agree coalition terms with the main opposition Republican People’s party, or CHP. But those talks never stood a chance. While CHP negotiators talked about power-sharing, reform and the rule of law, for the AKP it was always a zero sum game that precluded sharing power. For Erdogan, moreover, it is existential. Ever since the Gezi Park civic rebellion in 2013 against his ever more intrusive rule, he has acted as though he faces a vast conspiracy to topple him. True, former Islamist allies embedded in the police, judiciary and security services are out to get him. But what he really fears is accountability. That is why Erdogan has tried to bulldoze the rule of law, firing or sidelining police officers and magistrates, and to silence dissent, with hundreds of journalists sacked since the Gezi protests, and scores of people pursued for allegedly defaming him, especially on social media.

Across the border in Syria, to which until recently Ankara provided an extremist pipeline for volunteers and arms, the focus has been on toppling the rump regime of Bashar al-Assad and halting Syrian Kurdish territorial gains across the north of the country. The US and its allies have been frustrated at Erdogan’s reluctance to carry the fight to Daesh — especially where extremists are taking on the Kurds.

That supposedly changed after Isis bombed a Kurdish cultural centre in Suruc last month, killing 33. Then Turkey launched one air strike against Isis in northern Syria — and scores of attacks against the Kurdistan Workers party (PKK) in northern Iraq, to which the Syrian Kurd militias are allied. There is fear a new Kurdish entity in Syria, alongside the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government in north Iraq, will fuel the clamour for Kurdish self-rule in south-east Turkey. But the assault on the PKK and state of siege in the south-east is mostly about the election — a naked bid for nationalist votes.

Most of all, if the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic party (HDP) can be pushed back below the 10 per cent threshold for entry into parliament, nearly all its 80 seats will revert to the AKP. Thus the vilification of the HDP — Erdogan’s nemesis in June — as separatist wolves in sheep’s clothing.

While no poll suggests the president’s tactics are working, Turkey’s immune system is deteriorating alarmingly, as the AKP sweeps aside any vestige of political civility. Beset by Daesh barbarians at — and now inside — the gate, by rekindled Kurdish unrest and economic anaemia, Turkey’s overarching problem is Erdogan. With his latest roll of the dice, Turks may be about to find out how big that is.

— Financial Times