On March 14 Recep Tayyip Erdogan passed the ten-year mark of his premiership. He would have reached it in November but for the fact that at the precise moment in which Turks assigned the Akp the duty to govern their country in November 2002, our man was still serving a sentence banning him from public office. This was triggered by his now celebrated 1997 speech: “Mosques are our barracks, domes our helmets, minarets our bayonets and believers, our soldiers” – he stated while serving as Mayor of Istanbul, protesting against the military’s decision to outlaw the Welfare Party a few months earlier, to which the then first-citizen of the metropolis was affiliated.