President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan overcame his biggest political challenge in two decades in power by winning the election in Turkey on Sunday (28).
The country is going through an economic crisis that has pushed inflation to 45% and is recovering from an earthquake that left some 50,000 dead in February.
But Erdogan’s stay in power has not only consequences for the Turkish people.
It influences both regional power relations and Europe’s geopolitical game.
The entry of new nations into NATO (the Western military alliance led by the United States) requires the consent of all member countries.
Turkey is part of the alliance.
Erdoğan has been making it difficult and threatening to prevent Sweden’s entry if the country does not hand over suspected members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (known by the acronym PKK).
Finland and Sweden have asked to join NATO out of fear of Russian territorial expansionism, evidenced by the invasion of Ukraine.
Erdoğan was against Finland joining but changed his mind.
In addition, Turkey has been sheltering at least 4 million refugees from the war in Syria since 2011.
Erdoğan has given most of these refugees shelter, and Europe fears that if he changes his policy, a new wave of migrants could move in and destabilize the continent.
The Turkish president has been pressuring European Union countries to send more financial resources to attend to refugees – otherwise, he will “open the door” of Europe to immigrants.
Erdoğan has received pressure from right-wing parties to send the refugees back to Syria.
But he is likely to adopt the position of keeping them in Turkey but moving them to the political strongholds of his opponents.
This comes amid relatively frequent military operations carried out by Turkey on Syrian territory.
With Erdoğan in power, Russia and Turkey may continue to draw closer together.
Erdogan has been responsible for closer relations with Russia since the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine.
At the beginning of the conflict, the Turkish president did not adhere to the economic sanctions imposed on Russia by the G7 group, comprised of the world’s most industrialized democracies.
Despite bans from the United States and its allies, Erdoğan continued importing Russian oil and even suggested President Vladimir Putin visit the country.
In the past, the Turkish president had defied Washington by purchasing Russian armaments (anti-aircraft batteries) even though it is a member of NATO.
Therefore, the country was left out of the Western program of building the F-35 fighter plane.
But Erdoğan’s relationship with Moscow is ambiguous.
Turkey supplied Ukraine with Bayraktar drones, which played a decisive role at the beginning of the war by easily destroying Russian armored cars advancing on Kyiv.
The policy of relative balance achieved by Erdogan allowed him to be a broker, alongside the UN, of the agreement that allowed the flow of Ukraine’s and Russia’s grain production through the Black Sea – Turkey controls the Bosphorus strait, which is the exit from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean Sea.
This prevented a global food crisis and placed the Turk as a possible negotiator in a future ceasefire agreement raising his regional diplomatic status.
Turkey’s defeated candidate in the polls, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, advocated a policy of rapprochement with the United States and the European Union during the campaign.
Therefore, Erdoğan’s election, in theory, favors Russia, which can continue to take advantage of the independent position of the Turkish president.
Kilicdaroglu even accused the Kremlin of interfering in the elections but did not provide definitive proof.
On Twitter, he said that Russia contributed to Erdoğan’s re-election by producing false content and waging an information war to favor its candidate.
Russia is suspected of having carried out a similar operation in the 2016 election of Donald Trump in the United States.
The plot was discovered at the time by the State Department.
The election on Sunday was Erdoğan’s biggest political test since his first election.
At 69 and after two decades in power, Erdoğan has overcome many crises in which his political end was announced.
He is the president who has had the most power since Mustafa Kemal Atatürk founded the Republic of Turkey in 1923.
Erdoğan began his meteoric political career as mayor of Istanbul between 1994 and 1998, a post he executed efficiently and served as a stepping stone to becoming prime minister in 2003.
During his 11 years as head of government and his nine years as president, his way of exercising power became increasingly authoritarian, and the religious content of his policies became increasingly evident.
In 2013, a series of mass protests that lasted for weeks made it clear that much of Turkey’s most urban and secular society was tired of the attacks on press freedom, the religious morality increasingly affecting everyday life, and the authoritarian turn.
His role as the country’s sole strongman increased after the 2016 coup attempt and a year later with a constitutional reform that turned Turkey into a presidential system and gave Erdogan enormous executive powers.
In the past two years, Erdogan’s tendency to rule alone and decide everything has made itself felt in the economy, imposing a policy of cutting interest rates to stimulate spending, production, and employment, contributing to skyrocketing inflation.
Now, with the Turkish lira at historic lows against the dollar and euro, unemployment at 22.5%, and inflation at 45% (although independent economists put it at more than double that), Erdoğan is resorting to infrastructure inaugurations and displays of locally designed and manufactured weaponry to convince Turkey’s impoverished middle class of the country’s economic might.
His latest major test was the February earthquake that left over 50,000 dead in the country’s southeast, which sparked criticism of the mismanagement of relief efforts and accusations of corruption that allowed thousands of buildings to be erected without permits.
For international observers, the elections that ended this Sunday were a case apart in the country’s history.
Erdoğan could not close the race in the first round, even with all his advantages over the other candidates.
His main opponent had practically no TV time, while the president’s speeches were broadcast in full.
In addition, he increased the minimum wage three times over the last year and a half.
With information from Gazeta do Povo
News Turkey, English news Turkey, Turkish politics