How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship
ECE TEMELKURAN
(Fourth Estate, 272 PP, £16.99)
Tablet Bookshop price £15.29 • tel 020 7799 4064

As the chaos at Westminster unfolds around us, some could be forgiven for asking how a country which prides itself on pragmatism and stability ever ­managed to get to this point. But we are far from alone. Time and time again, in different contexts and countries, Ece Temelkuran, the campaigning Turkish commentator and author, says she has heard sensible people expressing the belief, “it couldn’t happen here”: in Britain on the night of the Brexit vote; in the US on the eve of Trump’s election; and in Turkey, as Erdogan gradually dismantled political and judicial structures and labelled his opponents terrorists. In her latest book, How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship, a riveting account which weaves personal anecdotes into gripping analysis, Temelkuran warns of an impending populist revolution across the globe.

According to Temelkuran, the masses, or more insidiously the “real people”, who have long been considered to be indifferent to ­politics and world affairs, are “globally ­withdrawing their assumed consent from the current representative system”. Key to the process, Temelkuran argues, is the new politics of identity which has gradually undercut a shared set of secular moral values. Right-wing populist movements, she argues, start by demanding “respect” by wrapping themselves in “the bulletproof political membrane of a cultural and political identity and exploiting a political correctness that has disarmed critical commentators”.