Erdogan will soon face a presidential election that he could lose

Turkey and Erdogan, an indivisible future ?

photo_camera PHOTO/AFP - Recep Tayyip Erdogan

October 29th was the anniversary of the Republic of Turkey. In three years, in 2023, it will also be its 100th anniversary, although the current drift into which Erdogan has plunged the country has more to do with the Ottoman imperialism that was left aside than with the republican secularism that emerged then. Between now and that year, the country is expected to host new presidential elections, if tactics or political urgency do not move the Turkish president forward, as the opposition fears. Only then will we know what the opposition's real chance is to prevent Erdogan from remaining in power, and whether the urbanistic push that the Republican People's Party (CHP) has recently acquired has a chance to go beyond the big cities like Ankara or Istanbul. All this in a context of economic crisis from which Turkey is struggling to emerge, with a constant collapse of the Turkish lira and a pandemic which only aggravates the trends, from the political to the economic and social.

In this climate of instability still controlled with an iron fist, Erdogan has opted for an increased presence in the current conflicts of his closest sphere of influence, we are talking about Syria, Libya, Iraq and now also Nagorno-Karabakh. And not only that, because in a region of relative calm and tension such as the Eastern Mediterranean, the situation has worsened in recent months due to Turkish interference and the dispute over energy resources in that region. With this move, the Turkish President is not only seeking to consolidate his political and now also military influence, but he is trying to wave the flag of neo-tourism to camouflage his internal situation, which, although not threatened in the short term, foresees a certain possibility of contestation in the next elections.

Whether this conflict will materialise depends on many factors that Erdogan will try - and is trying - to mitigate: economic crisis, social protest in urban areas, convergence of the opposing parties as happened in Istanbul and Ankara, etc. And he will not only have democratic elements at his disposal. It is a vox populi the way it dynamites the political opposition, with the selective imprisonment of personalities, it undermines its capacity to rally support, deepening the divergences which exist between forces such as the CHP and the HDP, the traditional pro-Kurdish party, and even the recent IYI party, with the one which formed the National Alliance with which they politically attacked the town halls of Ankara and Istanbul. These forces would represent what analyst Selim Koru calls "the problem of the 30 million". The other 50 million Turks are those who, according to Erdogan, on the anniversary of the military coup of 2014, had been saved for the future. These accounts come from the half of the population who systematically support the AKP leader and 10 million others who, even if they do not directly support him but align themselves politically with the MHP, maintain a great deal of sympathy for his expansionist and nationalist policies.

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Erdogan's main asset is the ideological divide between the three major opposition parties CHP (Kemalist Left), IYI (Kemalist Conservatism) and HDP (Pro-Kurdish Left). To this end, it proposes frameworks and dichotomies that deepen these differences, marking the HDP as terrorist because of its links with Kurdish terrorism, bringing together the nationalisms present in the CHP and the IYI in terms of foreign policy and interventionism, etc. It thus undermines possible future alliances around leaders such as the recently elected Mansur Yavas or Ekrem Imamoglu who capitalise on the discontent of big cities, youth and coastal areas where Erdogan's leadership is more contested.  

To this growing interventionism of Turkey in its immediate environment, whose nationalist vision it feeds internally, we must add another recent aspect, which has also increased in recent weeks: the confrontation with France. Dialectical confrontations with its NATO ally, resulting from Turkey's interference in regional conflicts, as well as the expansionism in the waters of the Mediterranean that Paris has undertaken to curb in support of Cyprus and Greece, are developing rapidly and touch the heart of NATO and the European Union. In recent days, however, Macron's decision to fight radical Islamism fervently has raised the tension between Paris and Ankara to the point where it is no longer possible to return. Erdogan saw the opportunity to identify a tangible enemy, no longer of Turkey but of Islam, in the figure of the French President, before whom the political majority in Turkey is gathering, eroding the possibilities of the opposition parties to represent a more moderate alternative in this nationalist escalation. Erdogan thus intends to set himself up as the main defender of those who attack the Muslim world, consolidating his geopolitical, military, cultural and now also religious role in the region. It is not in vain that his words against Emmanuel Macron have been joined by personalities from Egypt, Iran and Malaysia, but Erdogan has already succeeded in capturing the rejection of part of the Muslim world.  

This escalation of events has forced the French President to bring before the European institutions the imposition of sanctions and the revision of the agreements with Turkey, which will not be viewed favourably by some Member States, which will seek to defuse them, as could be the case with Germany, whose situation with regard to Turkey is problematic. It will certainly be supported by other States such as Greece, Cyprus and, probably, the Visegrad Group, whose rhetorical framework has a strong religious and cultural component. It remains to be seen whether the duration of these verbal clashes will be extended in time, maintaining the nationalist fervour that will allow Erdogan to take advantage in these presidential elections, or whether, on the contrary, the application of sanctions by the European Union - which I doubt - will deteriorate the economic situation and the social rejection by Turkish youth of this expansionist and anti-liberal drift by the Turkish president. In any case, Turkey's attitude must not be played down either in the European Union or in NATO, as it undermines their reliability as international players.  

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