What pushed the putsch, what now?
He weathered anti-government protests that lasted for months in 2013. He escaped the flames that engulfed some of his ministers in a corruption investigation nearly three years ago.
And now Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has survived a military coup -- a boast many of his predecessors ousted in previous army takeovers cannot share.
No one in Turkey predicted what happened on Friday night when soldiers took control of Istanbul's two main bridges across the Bosphorus and flew F-16 fighter jets low in Ankara.
However, in a country which has seen three military coups -- and one where direct force was not used -- there have always been signs of fault lines that could prompt such a move.
In recent years, critics, foreign governments and Turkish citizens have expressed concerns about a steady decline into authoritarianism under Erdogan.
Although he won much praise in the first few years after becoming prime minister in 2003, since becoming Turkey's first directly-elected president in August 2014 Erdogan has been accused of dictatorial ambitions.
Erdogan wants to change Turkey's constitution, which was installed in 1980 following the last successful military coup, to adopt an American-style presidential system which would give him greater power, writes AFP.
According to Aykan Erdemir, senior fellow at Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, the coup was a result of many factors including the military's fear of the new system.
He explained that the reasons for the coup included "one of the latest developments (that) has been the bill redesigning the high courts as well as Erdogan's refusal to be impartial".
PROTECTING DEMOCRACY?
The coup leaders, claiming to speak for the entire Turkish Armed Forces, said they'd done so in the name of protecting democracy.
"Turkish Armed Forces have completely taken over the administration of the country to reinstate constitutional order, human rights and freedom," the statement said.
The modern Turkish Republic was founded in 1923 by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, a former military officer deeply committed to a form of democratic nationalism and hardline secularism now called Kemalism.
The Turkish military sees itself as the guardian of Kemalism, and has overthrown four Turkish governments since 1960 in the name of protecting Turkey's democracy from chaos and Islamic influence.
Each time afterwards, the military has returned the country to democracy -- though in a degraded form.
Erdogan is clearly a threat to Turkish democracy and secularism, reads an analysis in Vox news site. He leads the AKP, a moderate Islamist party that has "reformed" Turkish schools along Islamist lines.
He's cracked down on Turkey's freedom of the press and pushed constitutional changes that would consolidate dangerous amounts of power in the president's hands.
The military had been shockingly quiet about these developments in recent years, leading many to believe that Erdogan had successfully cowed them into submission.
But this coup attempt suggests -- given the stated rationale of the coup-launchers -- that some in the military are taking up its traditional role as enforcers of Kemalist orthodoxy.
A Newsweek analysis adds that the Turkish military has always been powerful, and the country still boasts the second largest army in Nato, behind the US.
Politically, the military has been part of four different governments since the 1960s. But Erdogan's election in 2003 began a period of decline for the military, as the Turkish leader managed to limit its power.
In 2007, the armed forces issued a threat online to intervene in an inconclusive election. The case, known as the E-coup, sparked an investigation and a year later, Turkish investigators announced they had uncovered a genuine five-year-old plan to topple the government hatched by soldiers and public figures.
Erdogan's desire for a wider military campaign in Syria has not been popular among the military, nor has his growing conservatism.
Metin Gurcan, a former Turkish military officer who now works as an Istanbul-based security analyst, told the Wall Street Journal last week that with the diminishing political opposition in Turkey, military officials view themselves as the only ones able to “put on the brakes and create checks-and-balances against Erdogan.”
WHY DID THE COUP FAIL?
For Sinan Ulgen, director of the Edam think tank and visiting scholar at Carnegie Europe, this was not a coup by the full army as in previous cases, but undertaken by a clique who themselves held the top general hostage.
"This was beyond the chain of command -- a relatively small group in the army, who even hijacked the military top brass.
"It was not an operation designed by the army… Without the full support of the army, they lacked the assets and capabilities."
Erdemir said the era of successful coups -- as in 1960, 1971 and 1980 -- is over with the public largely hostile to the prospect.
This time the country put on more of a show of solidarity, with even the three opposition parties in parliament swiftly condemning the attempted putsch.
Political parties do not have "fond memories" of the previous coup d'etats given their bitter experiences under military rulers, said Erdemir.
Ulgen added: "When people realised it did not have backing of the army, it was easier to be against the coup."
Indeed the sheer odds stacked against the coup spawned conspiracy theories with the hashtag #Darbedegiltiyatro (It's not a coup it's theatre) trending on Twitter.
Natalie Martin, politics and international relations lecturer at Nottingham Trent University in Britain, said it appeared "almost meant to fail", something which created suspicions.
"It is entirely possible it's a false flag coup," she said.
According to Naunihal Singh, a political scientist at the Air War College, coups tend to succeed when their leaders convince other members of the military that they will inevitably succeed. If people think resistance is futile, even regime loyalists will just go with the flow.
That didn't appear to have happened. Reports on the ground in Turkey suggest that large portions of the military have sided with Erdogan. So, too, have street demonstrators and leading politicians -- including Erdogan opponents.
That means the coup leaders have doubly failed. They have failed to seize control of Turkey's government and failed to defend Kemalism from its greatest enemy in a generation, writes Vox.
CONSENSUS OR CRACKDOWN?
Erdogan, a consummate political tactician, will sense the failed coup has created opportunities to tighten his control over Turkey but faces a critical choice.
"He can build on the fact that all parties got behind him and build an era of consensus or he can use this as an opportunity to consolidate his one-man rule," said Erdemir.
"It's almost fully up to Erdogan -- the path he chooses will have enormous consequences. The optimist in me goes for the democratic way but the realist and pessimist says Erdogan would never miss such an opportunity and that would be a shame."
Erdogan will come out of this stronger, Ulgen said, but "the question is whether he is willing to use that to drive towards a more consensual politics".
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