It appears that democracy has fallen in Turkey, as Erdogan has arrested his only major political challenger – Istanbul’s mayor, Ekrem İmamoğlu. With Erdogan’s suppression of his (only) political opposition, he has signaled the transition from a democracy to an autocracy.
Protests have broken out but given Erdogan’s control of the military and security forces…meaningful change is unlikely. As the Middle East becomes a distant thought for the US, I wouldn’t expect any semblance of an American response. Similarly for European powers, since economic and security ties run deep with Turkey, challenging Erdogan would be a major faux pas.
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Hey, all. Peter Zeihan here coming from a foggy, snowy Colorado morning. Today we’re going to talk about protests in Turkey. The issue is we’ve got a power struggle at the top. You’ve got the sitting president, a guy by the name of Erdogan who has been in charge of all things in Turkey for almost a quarter of a century now.
Started out as prime minister when that was an important position. Eventually became president. And change the constitutions of the presidents is more powerful. Anyway, the challenger is a guy by the name of. Let’s see if I get this right. Akram Imamoglu, apologies to Turkish speakers out there. Anyway, he is the mayor of Istanbul. And who is going to run for president?
Had a decent chance of winning. And anyway, Erdogan has arrested the guy and then arrested his lawyer, to make sure that, nothing can happen, that Erdogan doesn’t want to happen. The issue here is that Turkey is no longer a democracy. Everyone is destroyed that system over the last 25 years. It’s definitely an autocracy. It’s not that there aren’t elections and it’s not.
Those elections don’t matter. They just really don’t matter at the top. Everyone is kind of absorbed all the political space. And while there might be some space, down below in offices that would never threaten him when it comes to national leadership, he just doesn’t tolerate any sort of dissent that’s meaningful. So we’ve got protests in Istanbul over the weekend with hundreds of thousands of people protesting.
And it’s probably not going to lead to much, because Erdogan controls the entire military, the security services. There’s really two things to keep in mind here. Number one is that Turkey is politically unified. Now in a way that it just hasn’t been since the time of the Ottoman Empire, when we were going through the 30s, 40, 50, 60, 70.
Well, sorry. Let’s start with the 50s. In the aftermath of the fall of the Ottoman Empire, a guy by the name of Ataturk, took over and basically ran the place as a benign dictatorship. And then as he was dying, he basically declared that Turkey would now be a democracy. He left the military as the stewards and allowed elections.
And then he passed on, and we had a real, true democratic elections. But if they ever resulted in anything that the military thought broke with the out of Turkey and tradition, we had a coup, with the most recent one being in the late 80s, early 90s. A little fuzzy now. Anyway, other one emerged out of that mess in the 2000 and then started to unify the Islamist side of the country with the democratic leaning side of the country, with the military side of the country, and eventually brought all three factions under the same political roof.
And he’s basically ruled without opposition for the last 10 to 15 years. Imamoglu would be basically looking to take one of those three traditions, the Democratic contrition and, relaunch it as an independent poll. And it doesn’t look like it’s going to be successful. So it’s kind of one. Number two is how the Europeans and the Americans think about this, under Trump.
Democracy is not a priority. And so there’s really no pressure as long as we get a few basic things from Turkey. Unclear what those are going to be because the United States is now out of the Middle East for the most part. With the Iraq War finally wound down and the war on terror finally won down. There’s just a few holdovers and places like Syria where the Americans are probably going to be leaving in the not too distant future, something that Donald Trump has been looking forward to and something that Erdogan has been looking forward to.
The second group, of course, are the Europeans who are integrated with Turkey much in the way that the United States is integrated with Mexican manufacturing. Much more robust relationship there, a lot more going on, whether it’s with migration or drugs or crime, or today, military alliances. Because with the United States going in a screaming retreat from confronting the Russians as part of the NATO alliance and probably leaving the NATO alliance fairly soon, the Turks all of a sudden become critical.
They have the largest military in NATO outside of the United States, certainly the largest army. And because they sit on the Turkish Straits, they control the access for about 40% of Russian exports, that are waterborne. They go through the Black Sea, through basically downtown Istanbul, through the Turkish Straits and up to the Mediterranean in the wider world.
The Turks have kind of kept one foot in NATO and one foot in neutrality when it comes to the Ukraine war. They haven’t supported the sanctions regimes that the Europeans have put on, but they’ve also acted to block the Russians from expanding in other directions and continue to sell a lot of very useful weaponry, most notably, more advanced drones, to the Ukrainians constantly throughout the entire conflict.
And if Ukraine were to fall, Turkey knows that its own national interests would be severely impinged. So we’re looking at the Europeans and the Turks starting to agree on more things at a time when the Americans are pulling back. And the price of that agreement from the European point of view, will mean basically not throwing up a fuss about the degradation of democracy in what is arguably their second most important neighbor.
So Erdogan is likely to get a pass here. The protests are almost certainly going to fail, and if there is going to be democracy in Turkey, it will have to be something that is forged by a different generation.
