“DEMOCRACY IS LIKE A STREETCAR. WHEN YOU COME TO YOUR STOP, YOU GET OFF,” Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan once said — and now we know which stop he chose for his final destination: Berlin.

Berlin in 1933: “Turkey’s Erdogan, Seeking a More Powerful Presidency, Cites Hitler’s System,” the New York Times reports:

ISTANBUL — President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, who is pushing to imbue the largely ceremonial presidency with sweeping executive powers akin to the United States or France, gave a new example of an effective presidential system late Thursday: Hitler’s Germany.

After returning from a trip to Saudi Arabia, Mr. Erdogan was asked by the Turkish news media whether a presidential system was possible given that the government is now organized under a prime minister.

“There are already examples in the world,” Mr. Erdogan said. “You can see it when you look at Hitler’s Germany.”

Hitler, who became chancellor of Germany in 1933, assumed the presidency in 1934, a move that allowed him to consolidate power to become the Führer.

While Mr. Erdogan did not elaborate, his comment is bound to raise concern among critics who view him as increasingly authoritarian.

Despite the Times’ early Pollyanna-ish dismissal of the post-Weimar socialist leader as a totally cool and dreamy “New Popular Idol,” whose “anti-Semitism was not so genuine or violent as it sounded,” I’m guessing this doesn’t bode well for Turkey — on the plus-side though, Obama promised voters plenty of change in the Middle East…