In the beginning, nearly 14 years ago, Recep Tayyip Erdogan chose a team of smart and qualified people to run Turkey with him. He now appears set to force out one of the last of that group -- Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu -- and replace him with someone more pliant. This is disastrous for Turkey, as financial markets have recognized.

To know why, look at the issues over which Erdogan and Davutoglu -- who is no rebel or hero of a Turkish secular democracy -- have sparred, fraying what was once the tightest and subservient of political relationships to breaking point.

The earliest split came soon after Davutoglu's appointment as Prime Minister, when he proposed an anti-corruption package in response to allegations of corruption made against Erdogan's family and closest political allies. Erdogan said the idea was premature and it was dropped.

Davutoglu was keen to preserve a measure of market confidence in the independence of Turkey's Central Bank, protecting it from Erdogan's curious beliefs about monetary policy (he has said that higher interest rates promote inflation, a theory refuted by several centuries of economic theory and empirical data). When a new central bank governor was to be appointed last month, Erdogan wanted someone more responsive to his demands for lower rates.

Davutoglu has also been marginally less hawkish on the destructive war with militants from Turkey's large Kurdish minority, which was rekindled last year. He spoke out in support of hundreds of academics, who were arrested under anti-terrorism laws for writing a public letter critical of Erdogan's Kurdish policies.

David Fuller's view

Recep Tayyip Erdogan has steadily reversed much that Mustafa Kemal Atatürk achieved when creating a secularized and westernized Republic of Turkey following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.  Will we next be referring to Erdogan as the Sultan of an undemocratic and increasingly authoritarian Turkey?