Tallip erdogan was at last poised this week to take over the formal running of government. But just as parliament appeared ready to give his administration a new vote of confidence, Turkey was in danger of falling ever deeper into an economic and diplomatic quagmire. Though he was the undisputed leader of the Justice and Development Party (AK), he had been excluded from its electoral triumph last November―and from standing for parliament―by a constitutional ban, as he had once been convicted of reciting an allegedly Islamist poem at a political meeting. And though AK had won an outright majority of the parliamentary seats, he could not, since he did not hold one of them, become prime minister.
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