The West is preparing for another five years for Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as the Turkish leader heads into the presidential runoff as the favorite.
U.S. and European officials are bracing for a bumpy road ahead of a president they see as troublesome and unpredictable, but also a key partner to the head of a NATO member that borders the Middle East and the Black Sea and is home to four million refugees.
Eric Edelman, a former U.S. ambassador to Turkey, said another term for the veteran leader would lead to continued tensions between the West and Ankara. “We will have a very unreliable ally whose policies will be driven by one man’s political needs and whims,” he said.
Notorious for his harsh rhetoric, Erdogan has cast himself as a strong leader who has charted a way for his country to escape the shackles of a hypocritical and untrustworthy West.
He has spent much of the past decade hovering between one crisis in foreign relations and another.
In the past five years alone, Erdogan has seen his country sanctioned by the United States for imprisoning an American pastor and buying a Russian air defense system, threatening to expel 10 Western ambassadors and flooding tens of thousands of refugees afterward. into the Greek border. Promised to “open the door” to Europe. On Saturday, a day before the first round of voting, he accused his rival Kemal Kilicdaroglu of collaborating with U.S. President Joe Biden to defeat him without offering evidence.
Before Sunday, with opinion polls showing Kılıçdaroğlu in the lead, foreign diplomats and their Turkish counterparts had allowed themselves to imagine how things might be different if the opposition took power.
Even if any new government is unlikely to make a substantive major shift in foreign policy and may present its own challenges, a senior Turkish official believes there will be a “more positive atmosphere” after years of public spats. “.
“(Western officials) have great goodwill towards Kılıçdaroğlu,” he said. “They like him.” By contrast, their feelings for Erdogan “border on hatred,” he added.
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The chances of change have diminished significantly since the Turkish president won the first round of voting by nearly 5 percentage points, giving him a clear advantage ahead of the May 28 runoff.
The first big test for the second-round winner involves Sweden’s NATO membership, which Turkey blocked after accusing the Nordic country of being soft on what he called Kurdish terrorists.
NATO officials are eager to approve Sweden’s entry into the military alliance at a summit in Lithuania in July.
But some worry that a strong showing by NATO skeptic Turkey’s ultranationalists in Sunday’s parliamentary vote will make the victorious Erdogan more inclined to delay the process. He could push for U.S. concessions, perhaps on Ankara’s plan to modernize its fleet of F-16 fighter jets, which has been put on hold by Congress.
At the heart of the problem, diplomats say, is that decisions such as Sweden’s NATO membership rest almost entirely on the capriciousness of Erdogan, who has unprecedented levels of power and centralized decision-making.
“As long as he thinks the benefits of keeping it in place outweigh the costs, I guess he will,” said a senior European official.
No one thinks that Turkey’s relations with Europe and the United States will be completely severed. Western trade and financing remain crucial to Türkiye’s struggling economy.
Although the Turkish president has developed a close personal relationship with Vladimir Putin, whose pre-election support for Erdogan included allowing delays in Russian gas payments, he knows part of his value to Moscow lies in his country Status as a member of NATO.
Nor can the West afford a complete breakdown with Ankara. “Turkey will be an important partner for us no matter who leads the country,” said Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
The U.S. and Europe are aware that the Turkish president, one of the few world leaders with whom both Putin and Zelensky enjoy good relations, plays a key intermediary role in the Ukraine crisis.
EU countries remain anxious about Erdogan’s threat to send more refugees to the continent. Turkey, a country of 85 million people, remains an important market for European companies.
Analysts and policymakers predict that if Erdogan’s two-decade rule is extended, Turkey’s relationship with Brussels will remain unchanged, with no progress on Turkey’s application to join the European Union or efforts to upgrade its customs union with the bloc. Cooperation will be targeted and transactional, with a focus on areas such as security and trade, they added.
Still, Ilk Toygur, a professor of European geopolitics at the Carlos III University in Madrid, warned that relations between the two countries could deteriorate further from their already low base if Western countries abandon the restraint they have shown over the past year or so. “They backed off because they didn’t want to be campaign material for President Erdogan,” she said. “But if he wins the second round, there’s no reason to back down.”
One flashpoint on the horizon is Brussels’ push to punish non-EU countries that help Moscow circumvent European sanctions, with the aim of forcing countries like Turkey to work harder to enforce them. But Alexander Gabuev, director of the Carnegie Center for Russia in Eurasia, said the Kremlin wanted to “continue the current relationship” with Erdogan, which he said had “played an important role” in bypassing the sanctions .
Alper Coşkun, a former Turkish diplomat now based in Washington, said he worried about the long-term effects of deepening tensions with the West at a time when the Turkish public already has deep distrust of both the United States and Europe.
“European integration is progressing, but there is no mention of Turkey,” Coşkun said. “In five more years, that sense of alienation will deepen.”
He continued: “This will have an impact on the worldview of Turkish society and the extent to which countries such as Russia and China are cultivating (anti-Western) psychology in Turkey.”