On the very first day of 2016, news agencies reported a bizarre story out of Turkey. At a press conference, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan referred to “Hitler’s Germany” as an example of the political system he proposes for his country — “a presidential system with a unitary state.” This statement was, of course, seized by the press, with worrying headlines such as “Erdogan cites Hitler's Germany as example of effective government.”

A couple of hours later, the president’s office released an official correction. Reminding everyone that Erdogan has condemned the Holocaust and anti-Semitism as “a crime against humanity, just like Islamophobia,” the statement asserted that the president pointed to Hitler’s Germany only as a very bad example of “the presidential system.” The statement blamed the media for the confusion, claiming the “Hitler’s Germany metaphor has been distorted by media outlets and has been used in the opposite sense.”

Listening to the press conference live in Turkish, I thought that perhaps it would be more realistic to accept that Erdogan made a puzzling remark rather than accusing the media of distortion. True, Erdogan did not praise the Third Reich at all, and did not reference it as his model. But he should have calculated that any reference to Hitler’s Germany without a disclaimer would have created such a buzz.

So, this was obviously a blunder on Erdogan’s side. But what kind? Opposition voices in Turkey see it as a Freudian slip, or even a well-calculated tactic to instill the seeds of the tyrannical model he really has in mind. I rather see a reckless reference in an already reckless, uncalculated remark, in which Erdogan made another mistake that many people missed. He said, “We see this [presidential] model in the overwhelming majority of developed countries.” However, as a simple Internet search would show, most developed countries are in fact either constitutional monarchies or parliamentary republics. The presidential system Erdogan promotes can be found in the good example of the United States, but also in many African and Asian dictatorships.