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Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has never been so weak – nor so strong. At home, he is facing the most potent challenge to his power since an armed coup in 2016, in the form of a serious electoral challenger whom he has just jailed, causing massive protests and unsettling the money markets. Internationally, though, he has never been stronger. Every major power bloc in the world, it seems, needs Turkey’s help, with issues ranging from immigration to peacekeeping and energy supplies.
Instead of sinking his main rival’s candidacy, the Turkish president has created a martyr
For Europe, Erdogan remains a major gas supplier and an essential bulwark against immigrants from Syria and Afghanistan. Turkey is a powerful Nato member with a 350,000-strong army and a booming defence industry, which could play a leading role in rearming Europe and participating in a peacekeeping force in Ukraine. For Russia, Erdogan has played a key middleman role in Black Sea shipping negotiations with Kyiv, while Turkey remains a major export route for Russian gas. It has refused to sign up to European sanctions and remains a key trading partner of Moscow’s. Yet Turkey remains an ally and trading partner of Ukraine, with a company owned by Erdogan’s son-in-law supplying the country’s Bayraktar-2 drones.
Most important is Erdogan’s continued strong relations with the US. Turkey remains an essential (though not wholly reliable) ally in Syria and against Iran. Donald Trump is a big admirer of Erdogan and reports suggest he could visit Washington next month. A recent conversation between the two leaders was described as ‘great’ and ‘really transformational’ by Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff.
Ekrem Imamoglu, Erdogan’s only opponent with a real chance of winning the next presidential election, was arrested two days after the Trump call. It was almost as if Erdogan was testing the temperature of his relationship with Trump before making his fateful move. The gamble paid off. Washington’s push-back has been minimal.
‘We would encourage Turkey to respect human rights and handle its internal framework appropriately,’ said a state department spokesperson as Erdogan’s troops cracked heads and doused tens of thousands of protestors on the streets of Istanbul with tear gas. ‘But we will not comment on domestic issues.’ Contrast this with the condemnation meted out by Washington and Brussels on Belarus in 2020 when Alexander Lukashenko used violence against protestors in Minsk.
‘This is happening because Erdogan feels both threatened and emboldened,’ says Soner Çagaptay, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute. ‘Threatened because Imamoglu will defeat him, if free to run, and emboldened because, as far as the global community is concerned, [he] is free to do whatever he likes domestically.’
Erdogan has spent years eroding democracy, eliminating opposition media, stifling dissent, packing the judiciary and purging Turkey’s army and civil service. Removing Imamoglu is his most blatant power move yet. Judges appointed by Erdogan’s ruling AK party had already stacked corruption charges against Imamoglu. University authorities had even rescinded his degree – rendering him technically ineligible to run for president. But his arrest and imprisonment was Erdogan’s nuclear option. It came on the eve of Imamoglu’s anointment as the official candidate of the main opposition Republican People’s party, or CHP.
The resulting protests, the biggest ever against Erdogan, reflect Imamoglu’s popularity and the disconnect between Istanbul and the Anatolian heartland, Erdogan’s religious-conservative power base. The CHP chairman, Ozgur Ozel, described the arrest as a ‘coup’ against the man they believe is Turkey’s next president. And 15 million people – the vast majority not even CHP party members – showed up over the weekend to symbolically vote for Imamoglu as the CHP’s candidate. Instead of sinking his main rival’s candidacy, Erdogan has created a martyr. He has also caused a run on the lira that wiped out 79 per cent of the country’s foreign exchange reserves from last year in just three days and prompted a draconian month-long ban on short-selling on the Istanbul stock exchange.
This is by no means Erdogan’s first rodeo. He has faced serious challenges before – and not shrunk from putting them down in brutal ways. In the wake of a 2016 coup attempt by the army, he imprisoned more than 100,000 people and launched a purge of the police, military and judiciary. During protests that broke out across Turkey in 2013 and snowballed into a weeks-long anti-regime showdown between protestors and police, six people were killed and at least 7,478 injured.
European and US protests over that were pretty muted, too. The aftermath of the Arab Spring was under way, with Erdogan’s diplomats playing firefighting roles, and Bashar al-Assad was starting his bloody crackdown in Syria. The West has always placed pragmatic international relations ahead of defending Turkish democracy.
This time, though, Erdogan’s authoritarian tendencies have been truly unleashed. His power has hitherto been tempered by regular elections which, despite media stifling and local rigging, still produced results that defied his government – for instance, for mayor of Istanbul in 2019 and 2024. Now, he seems to be tilting directly at two fundamental aspects of the legacy of Ataturk, founder of the Republic of Turkey: secularism and democracy.
Back in 1996, Erdogan – himself then a popular opposition mayor of Istanbul – was quoted (though he has denied it) as saying that ‘democracy is like a tram – you ride it until you reach your destination’. Two years later, he was in jail for reciting a religious poem with the line ‘our minarets are our bayonets’. Though he was then banned from holding office because of that conviction, his AK party swept to power in 2002. Now, it seems, the democracy tram has taken him as far as he needs – to a place of absolute power comparable with that of central Asia’s dictators.
The current geopolitical moment dictates that Turkey’s western allies – Ataturk’s onetime role models – turn a blind eye. But in truth, the death of the biggest Muslim democracy in the region should be ringing serious alarm bells across the free world.
Paul Wood and Gideon Rachman join the latest episode of The Spectator’s Edition podcast to discuss Erdogan, Putin and the new age of the strongman:
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