THE RISK REPORT BY IAN BREMMER
FOR MORE THAN 20 years, Recep Tayyip Erdogan has remade and dominated Turkey’s politics. First as Prime Minister, then as President, he built a political foundation with support from voters outside the country’s powerhouse cities—Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir—with appeals to traditional religious values and socially conservative policies.
Over time, however, he has also polarized the country by amassing more and more executive power in his own hands, and by silencing, in some cases imprisoning, critics and journalists who tell stories he doesn’t like. He has sidelined judges who don’t rule his way. Following a failed military coup in 2016, he purged the upper ranks of the army.
Now he faces his toughest test. The largest opposition parties have united behind the candidacy of a single challenger, a technocrat named Kemal Kilicdaroglu. Voting begins on May 14, and a second-round runoff on May 28 appears likely between the combative and charismatic Erdogan and the mild-mannered and consensus-orientedo Kilicdaroglu. Current polling says this race could go either way.
Outsiders will focus on expected differences in their foreign policies. Even as a member of the NATO alliance, Erdogan has established a degree of independence between the West and Russia. At various times, he has both courted and infuriated Russia, Europe, and the U.S. with a transactional approach to nearly every important question. His ability to play one off the other is limited by Turkey’s dependence for security on NATO and on Russia for a strong economy, particularly in the tourism sector. Erdogan has not joined other NATO members in full backing for Ukraine, but he has offered Turkey’s services as a crucial dealmaker, including on the flow of both Ukrainian and Russian agricultural productsR a out of the Black Sea and into the Mediterranean. Erdogan’s harsh words for the E.U. and some European governments, and his foot-dragging on questions liked NATO membership for Finland and Sweden, has made him a gadfly in Brussels.
That’s the main reason a Kilicdaroglu victory would be welcomed in Europe and in Washington. His foreign policy would focus on restoring trust in Turkey’s reliability as an ally
