With an inflation rate of 50 percent, a currency that has lost nine-tenths of its value in the past decade, and a flagging economy, Turkey is dangerously close to becoming a failed state.
Add to this miserable record the botched response to a cataclysmic earthquake in February that killed 50,000 people, and one would certainly conclude that every leader who presided over this nightmare lost every election by landslide would.
But Recep Tayyip Erdogan isn’t known as “The Sultan” for nothing. He didn’t quite win the presidential election on Sunday, but he did win 49.5 percent of the vote and will now go into a runoff against his book opponent Kemal Kilicdaroglu (74), who won CHK with 44.9 percent.
Apparently, the mass arrests, hounding of independent media, and merciless firing of every official and army chief who didn’t stand by the line has paid off.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan waves as he casts his ballot during Turkey’s general election May 14, 2023 in Istanbul, Turkey. Now he has to compete again against his rival in a runoff
Supporters of Erdogan celebrate at the AK Party headquarters in Istanbul, Turkey, on May 15
The turnout was almost 90 percent: a measure of the enormous importance that Turks have on the ballot.
But Erdogan’s future – like Turkey’s – is still at stake. Should he go, it would be one of the most gratifying geopolitical events in at least a decade. And if he stays, Turkey’s descent into disaster will surely worsen.
Turkey’s history is that of a nation at the crossroads of East and West: a tension expressed in 69-year-old Erdogan and his opponent Kilicdaroglu.
Not only is the country one of the largest Islamic democracies in the world, its army is also the second largest in NATO after that of the United States.
Although it has failed to join the EU – and never will, even under Erdogan’s authoritarian leadership – it has a bespoke trade deal with the EU CHK.
Above all, it has become a refugee magnet, forced to take in millions of Syrians, Afghans and Iranians – among others – fleeing civil war and abject poverty in their own countries.
Beginning in 2015, Erdogan weaponized these flows of people to extort billions of dollars in subsidies from the EU, threatening to relax border controls to Greece and the Balkans if the money ever dried up.
He similarly cracked down on NATO, promising to block entry by new members Finland and Sweden unless they extradite Kurdish activist refugees who oppose his ruthless regime.
In a post-Erdogan world, Turkey could once again be a true friend and ally of the West and no longer its blackmailer.
For now, however, he seems intent on making life miserable for his supposed allies.
The last thing Vladimir Putin wants, for example, is to see Erdogan fall.
Yes, Machiavellian Erdogan supplies deadly Bayraktar TB-2 drones — invented and manufactured by his own son-in-law — to the Ukrainian military, which then uses them to destroy Russian tanks.
But Turkey has adamantly refused to go along with EU sanctions against Russia.
It also imports large quantities of Russian gas and re-exports it to the Balkans and southern Europe, allowing Russian energy giant Gazprom to defy Western sanctions.
Putin will do anything to keep his Turkish “friend” in power. Not only has Russian state television slavishly supported Erdogan’s re-election, but the Turkish opposition has credibly accused Moscow of supporting Erdogan’s re-election by providing “deepfake” videos aimed at discrediting it.
Last Thursday, an opposition candidate dropped out of the running, claiming his face appeared in a porn video made with Russian deepfake technology.
The opposition also believes a video played by Erdogan at a campaign rally earlier this month, showing the leadership of the banned Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) singing and clapping along to the opposition’s campaign song, was another example of the Kremlin’s dirty technological tricks.
Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the 74-year-old leader of the centre-left pro-secular Republican People’s Party, arrives in Ankara today for a press conference
A person walks past billboards of Turkey’s Presidential and People’s Alliance presidential candidate Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Istanbul on Monday, May 15, the day after the election
Erdogan, who was mayor of Istanbul and later prime minister before becoming president in 2014, initially enjoyed impressive growth – a boom that was later quashed by his own unorthodox economic policies.
Critics accuse him of systematically undermining the secular democratic system introduced by Turkey’s founder Kemal Atatürk in the 1920s and 1930s.
Turkey’s future will soon be decided – and its course may once again be guided by the noble ambitions of this much-lamented statesman.
Or Erdogan could win – and our world will become even more dangerous.