I wonder if there are many conservative Erdogan supporters like this optimist:
> “There are some minor problems, with the economy, with people being unable to speak, or people being sent to jail. If Erdoğan changed these things, life wouldn’t be perfect, but it would improve,” he said.
Which basically sums up that there is voter suppression, intimidation of opposition parties, limitations on freedom of expression and the media, and allegations of vote rigging. There is also the dominance of the ruling party in Turkish politics
Augusto Pinochet, the former dictator of Chile, was voted out of office in a national referendum in 1988.
Park Chung-hee, the former dictator of South Korea, was assassinated in 1979, leading to the country's transition to democracy.
General Hissene Habre, the former dictator of Chad, was ousted from power in 1990 through a national conference and multiparty elections.
Slobodan Milosevic, the former president of Yugoslavia, was voted out of office in 2000 after a disputed election and mass protests.
Blaise Compaore, the former president of Burkina Faso, was forced to resign in 2014 after a popular uprising and protests against his attempts to extend his 27-year rule.
Pinochet remained in charge of the army for another 10 years after that referendum, effectively continuing to "oversee" the transition. Even after that, he was senator for life.
Oh and he didn't really want to go anyway. From Wikipedia: "In the wake of his electoral defeat, Pinochet attempted to implement a plan for an auto-coup. He attempted to implement efforts to orchestrate chaos and violence in the streets to justify his power grab, however, the Carabinero police refused an order to lift the cordon against street demonstrations in the capital, according to a CIA informant. In his final move, Pinochet convened a meeting of his junta at La Moneda, in which he requested that they give him extraordinary powers to have the military seize the capital. Air Force General Fernando Matthei refused, saying that he would not agree to such a thing under any circumstances, and the rest of the junta followed this stance, on grounds that Pinochet already had his turn and lost. Matthei would later become the first member of the junta to publicly admit that Pinochet had lost the plebiscite. Without any support from the junta, Pinochet was forced to accept the result."
Being assassinated is clearly not being voted out. More importantly though, I think you've failed to consider the much larger number of authoritarians who were never voted out at all- you have to consider the counterfactual too
One of the OG dictators, Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix, just walked away from his dictatorship (but not before he killed all of his political enemies and anyone else that he mildly disliked).
Today “dictator” is sort of just a synonym for “despot”, but it was an official position in the old Roman Republic—it was a six month post that the Senate would assign to someone during desperate times, giving them essentially absolute power for their term; however, it was seldom used. Sulla marched an army into Rome and insisted the Senate make him dictator indefinitely.
It was actually used very frequently for about 300 years, as you can see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Roman_dictators . It was, however, a relatively weaker position, and mostly focused on dealing with external threats that required urgency in logistical and military choices. The modern definition really comes from Sulla and later Caesar, who resuscitated the practice after several generations of disuse, and took it to the extreme.
> Following the 1990 general elections, Milošević enacted dominant-party rule while his party retained control over key economic resources of the state.
> Milošević's rule has been described as authoritarian or autocratic, as well as kleptocratic, with numerous accusations of electoral fraud, political assassinations, suppression of press freedom and police brutality.
> “There are some minor problems, with the economy, with people being unable to speak, or people being sent to jail. If Erdoğan changed these things, life wouldn’t be perfect, but it would improve,” he said.