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Last week, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu's declared that Turkey would not 'succumb to the Jewish lobby'.

Every month now, we get treated to another anti-Semitic blast from Turkey's leadership, which seems to be running some kind of slur-of-the-month club. Who knew that Jews all over the world were busy trying to take down President Recep Tayyip Erdogan?

Last week, it was Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu's turn to declare that Turkey would not "succumb to the Jewish lobby" among others supposedly trying to topple Erdogan, the Hurriyet Daily News reported.

This was after Erdogan had suggested that domestic opponents to the ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, were "co-operating with the Mossad", Israel's intelligence arm.

So few Jews, so many governments to topple.

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Davutoglu's and Erdogan's cheap, crude anti-Semitic tropes, which Erdogan relies on regularly to energise his base, are disgusting.

For the great nation of Turkey, though, they're part of a wider tragedy. It is really hard to say any more that Erdogan's Turkey is a democracy. Even worse, it is necessary to say that Turkey's drift away from democracy is part of a much larger global trend today: Democracy is in recession.

As Stanford University democracy expert Larry Diamond argues in an essay titled Facing Up to the Democratic Recessionin the latest issue of the Journal of Democracy: "Around 2006, the expansion of freedom and democracy in the world came to a prolonged halt. Since 2006, there has been no net expansion in the number of electoral democracies, which has oscillated between 114 and 119 (about 60 per cent of the world's states).

"The number of both electoral and liberal democracies began to decline after 2006 and then flattened out. Since 2006, the average level of freedom in the world has also deteriorated slightly."

See more here:
Democracy's recession deepens as autocrats power back in Turkey and Russia