Turkey is one of those countries where the presidency is a largely ceremonial function, so the parliamentary elections that determine the PM are far more important. For your information, Germany has its president elected by the Bundestag rather than in a popular vote as well, because there too the presidency is largely ceremonial. And one would think an American would have some amount of understanding for political systems that don't elect the president in a direct popular vote, all things considered.

As for the ruling party needing three elections, that's true but I'm not sure how it reflects badly on them - they weren't the ones refusing to vote in order to prevent a quorum being reached.

You're quite right that the secular military remains a problem, although if you're at all honest you will admit that there has been massive progress in that regard of late, but the AKP is a broad people's party with solid popular support, and as a whole is far from fundamentalist.

"Genocide denying" is fair enough, the rest is sheer nonsense; see the title of the post (and snoop's earlier comments).

As for your other comments, it's true that Holocaust denial is a punishable offense in a number of countries in the EU, but just because the EU published a text like that doesn't mean it's become a punishable offense in those countries in the EU that didn't have Holocaust denial laws on the books already (which includes the UK). And all the stuff you copypasted from Wikipedia, as far as I can see, proves snoop's point that most of those free speech-restricting court cases were started by civilians or at least by forces other than the government (i.e. the military), and that most of them didn't result in a conviction anyway. Of course they should abolish the law allowing those cases even so, but in practice freedom of speech in Turkey is reasonably good even if it is not yet perfect - certainly a far cry from what it's like in authoritarian regimes. Turkey isn't a perfect democracy yet, but far closer to that than to a real dictatorship or authoritarian regime.