Sezgin, Yüksel. "Why is Tunisian democracy succeeding while the Turkish model is failing?". The Washington Post, 8 November 2014.

Sezgin, Yüksel. "Why is Tunisian democracy succeeding while the Turkish model is failing?". The Washington Post, 8 November 2014.

• Samuel Huntington established a 'two turnover' test to confirm whether a state was an emerging or established democracy. If it had survived two peaceful transitions of power to the political opposition after free and fair elections, then a state became an 'established democracy'.
• This is a difficult test to pass, for just time reasons, as America did not become an established democracy until the Democratic victory in 1840, after 50 years as an emerging democracy.
• Tunisia is a far better model for Middle Eastern democracy than Turkey is. Excepting a period between 1974 and 1979, Turkey has never been completely free or democratic, whereas Tunisia completed their first peaceful democratic transition of power in 2014 despite an economic recession and rising domestic Islamist extremism.
• Turkey could learn from the Tunisian example, with its focus on tolerance and compromise between opposing political parties. This is especially true in electoral structure, as Tunisia has adopted a parliamentary system with proportional representation, whereas Turkey is moving towards a more authoritarian-prone presidential system, considered adopting a first-past-the-post system, and maintains a very high threshold for parliamentary representation.
• Turkey should attempt to build a constitution more like that adopted, with 92% approval, in Tunisia in 2014. Instead, its attempt to change its constitution foundered under AKP insistence that Turkey move to a presidential system, and the country retains the 1982 Constitution, written by the Turkish military.
• The government response to the 2013 Gezi Park protests showed that Turkey was heading towards a more repressive and authoritarian form of governance. This has been confirmed by latter meddling in the judiciary and other violations of the separation of powers.
• Tunisia had its first free democratic elections in October 2011, after the fall of the Ben Ali government. The conservative Islamist Ennahda party won 41% of the vote and formed a coalition with two secular parties.
• Both Turkey and Tunisia are highly polarized on religious-secular lines, and both societies feature low levels of interpersonal trust. This makes cooperation between religious and secular parties difficult, as had manifested in Turkish politics, making the successes of Tunisian democracy all the more bracing.
• Tunisia has experienced a greater degree of democratization that Turkey because its population is less ideologically fixed, more centrist, and less sure about their beliefs and ideologies. This has given parties an incentive to move towards the center and compromise in Tunisia, in a way that they do not in Turkey.
• The divergence between Turkey and Tunisia is also a result of the different attitudes of President Erdogan and Rachid Ghannouchi, the leader of Ennahda. Whereas Recep Erdogan interprets his electoral majority as a mandate to rule as he pleases, Mr. Ghannouchi has remained respectful and conciliatory towards the opposition.