“Turkiye is standing at the threshold of a new, transformative era. We will rise, and our place in the world will be strengthened”.
These bold words were uttered by Turkish president (ruler since 2003) Recep Tayiip Erdogan when he introduced his party’s (AKP) 8th Grand Congress, on the day of Germany’s parliamentary elections, one day ahead of the 3-year anniversary of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, and three days ahead of his 70th birthday. The Congress indeed took place in “a new, transformative era”, dominated by Donald Trump’s remarkable return to the White House and the shock-and-awe effects, domestically and internationally, of his first month in office.
Although Turkey has been acclaimed as one of the two “winners” of the sudden regime change in neighboring Syria, alongside Israel – even though the two emerge as bitter rivals over key issues in the region -, the regional and global role of Turkey, as potential and as regime aspirations, has been largely overshadowed by the unfolding dramas of Ukraine and the Middle East, reflecting the manifest difficulty of the voice of Ankara to be heard internationally in the global noise created mainly by the disruptive moves by the Trump administration and its apparent, early attempts to create a more or less new world order, with worryingly open questions as to what this all will mean for Europe, and NATO, and hence for Turkey sitting at the crossroads between the east-west and the north-south dimensions of global geo-politics.
So where is Turkey in this process of sea-change? Will, for instance, a probably weakened NATO (as a result of current Trump administration policies over Ukraine-Russia) result in a process of rapprochement between Turkey and fellow European Nato members because of a perceived need of strengthened security cooperation, or the contrary, a further gliding apart between these as a result of a perceived widening of both values and interests, with both history and geography providing the determinants? The jury is still out on this, for all the almost universal recognition of Turkey’s strategic importance, with more than 85 million people and NATO’s second biggest army – and a growing defense industry, among other indicators.
Still, there are many questions and uncertainties pertaining to Turkey’s role and identity ahead of the next few months and years. Turkey has suffered many years of economic crisis with no easy fix on the horizon, imposing real suffering on the population, and Turkey is still in search of a stable, legitimate constitutional arrangement after more than a decade of de facto state of emergency and of a clear direction in its foreign policy in the various strategic directions, Turkey-EU, Turkey-US, Turkey-Russia, Turkey as a Middle East great power, etc. These various aspects are manifestly interlinked.
Politically, as a result of the 2023 presidential and parliamentary elections in which the Erdogan regime, based on the strategic cooperation between the dominant AK Party and the ultra-nationalist MHP, prevailed, and of the 2024 municipal elections where the main opposition party CHP sailed to victory, the landscape is characterized by a fog of uncertainty and of the lingering impact of the power game 2013-2019 that led to the establishment of the current presidential system “a la turca”, internationally labelled authoritarianism. The big question now concerns the extent to which this authoritarian system, tailor-made for Erdogan, is sustainable and the extent to which genuine reform is possible and needed, and if so how and what. Can the system be reformed with Erdogan still in the presidential palace – his current mandate from the 2023 election expires, constitutionally, in 2028 – or should the reform discourse rather have to be focused on the “post-Erdogan” era? These are obviously sensitive matters – succession and legacy issues are always sensitive issues in contexts of authoritarianism – but constitutional reform issues also arise at lower levels of political sensitivity, regarding the functioning of the system rather than the total abolishment of it.
In the case of Turkey, not surprisingly, it now seems clear that it has become president Erdogan’s intention to seek one more mandate period after expiry of the current one in 2028, and hence to seek ways and means to make that constitutionally possible. The background is that in the constitutional amendment imposed through a highly controversial referendum in 2017, carried out under conditions of a state of emergency introduced following the 2016 attempted coup, it is clearly stated that a president (in the new presidential system) can have maximum two 5-year mandate periods – unless a formal state of emergency is (again) declared. Under this constitutional provision even the current mandate and Erdogan’s eligibility was and is contested, but now, apparently, the question whether the system can survive without Erdogan at the helm has arisen as a top priority concern. The problem then is that the (controversial) constitution specifies the requirements of the (again) needed constitutional change, a qualified parliamentary majority for a decision by parliament, a majority that the ruling AKP-MHP de facto coalition currently does not command.
This in turn links the sensitive succession (and legacy) question to the lingering Kurdish question, since in order to mobilize a sufficient majority in parliament for the needed constitutional change paving the way for continued Erdogan rule – given that support from the main opposition party CHP is unthinkable – the “Kurdish vote” is called for. But for this a resolution to the notorious Turkish “Kurdish problem” is required – a long-standing political requirement in Turkey’s state- and nation-building processes. And here we are to remember the way in the years 2012-15 a “resolution process” was attempted by the AKP government, one that was interrupted in the fatal year of 2015 when then pro-Kurdish party leader Selahattin Demirtas refused to link regime concessions to a Kurdish pledge to support Erdogan’s plans to impose a presidential system (Demirtas is still in jail), and the way “the Kurdish vote” helped the CHP candidates to prevail in Istanbul and Ankara in the municipals both of 2019 and 2024. We are also to remember that the imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan remains seen as key to any renewed resolution process.
Hence a process of negotiations since last autumn leading to an anticipation now of a deal with Öcalan under which he, in exchange for hitherto unknown improvements to the Kurdish cause and his own personal situation, will make a public statement to the effect of recommending, or ordering, the PKK to terminate its armed rebellion. For now, that statement is, at the latest, expected to be held on March 21, the Kurdish new year, Newros. The potential, politically but also economically, of such a development – Turkey finally abandoning constant lethal crisis management over its “Kurdish issue”, perhaps also paving the way for a resolution to the related problems in northern Syria and northern Iraq – is considerable and comprehensive, not least as regards Turkey’s relations with the EU. But several hurdles are likely to remain as regards realizing this potential, and it does remain controversial, now as before, to link a resolution to the Kurdish question to the Erdogan regime’s quest for political survival. Resolution to the Kurdish problem and democratization are linked in Turkey, although, of course, democratization is a wider concept, and in the current, tense and mixed, situation rule of law in Turkey is suffering from a wave of arrests of different categories of regime opponents.
But, as we know, the Kurdish question also has a lingering regional aspect, one which ties it to US-Turkey relations, uncertain as these are in Trump times. If, as expected by many, Öcalan does declare an end to the protracted armed conflict between the Turkish state and PKK, what does that mean for the YPG/PYD under the (US supported) SDF umbrella in northern Syria, as part of the ongoing establishment of a new Syria under its new HTS-rooted regime? Again, the jury is still out, but it seems clear that some kind of compromise here between Turkey’s concerns, under the umbrella of “anti-terror”, and emerging Trump-US’ strategic interests under the umbrella of US-Israel anti-Iran cooperation, will be an important ingredient in US-Turkey relations generally. But so will, obviously, US’ role in and perceptions of Israeli-Turkish relations as the next steps in the Gaza and Lebanon lethal crises unfold. President Obama made strong efforts to help normalize Turkish-Israeli relations at the time, but it remains unclear how Trump will decide to balance between the US’ two main allies in the region.
This, finally, is an attempt to remind that in times of dramatic change, globally and in the US, there is still, also, a Turkey factor, struggling with a number of domestic bones of contention, but insisting that it cannot be ignored.