On the streets of Istanbul, it seems a typically democratic election season, with multicolored flags and posters of more than 6 parties, each hoping to pass a 10% -of-the-vote hurdle to obtain seats in the National Assembly. But when Turks go to the polls this Sunday, they will either accelerate or put the brakes on their 93-year old republic’s departure from its founder Kemal Ataturk’s vision of the secular, democratic, Western-facing polity toward a more authoritarian, neo-Ottoman regime that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his ruling Justice and Development Party (AK-Parti) have been engineering ambitiously for several years. This election is as fateful as the Gezi Park demonstrations that first alerted millions of Turks and roiled much of the rest of the country.