Am I Still Optimistic About Turkey?

In today’s podcast Ruairi and I dive in on Turkey.1 It’s pretty depressing. The government’s sacking of the main opposition party’s offices is what convinced us to dive back in, and it set a pretty grim tone.

On a geopolitical level, Turkey is one of the biggest “winners” of the 2020s. The Ukraine war means that US and Europe still need NATO’s 2nd biggest army and burgeoning defense industry to put pressure on the Black Sea. The interminable Syrian war that tore Turkey apart and perpetuated Erdoğan’s time in power is over. Turkey is the clearest winner, with Syria run by a client that Israel constantly drives further into dependence on Ankara.

President Erdoğan seems to be the one of the only world leaders Trump is at all close to. The Iran war presents risks for Turkey, but makes NATO even less likely to complain about the country’s dismal internal politics. And those politics are incredibly dismal.

Erdoğan has won on every front. Internationally, domestically, and even in the Kurdish East of Turkey, everything is working out well for the Turkish president. But outside of the defense sector, the economy is in shambles, on the verge of being downgraded by international agencies. Turkish democracy is essentially dead.

Historically I’ve been an optimist about Turkey. In today’s episode it’s pretty clear that that old feeling is almost dead. You can listen to the episode below, or you can read the post below, where I try to rally some of that old optimistic vibe.

For the longest time, after war, coups, consolidating authoritarianism, accelerating brain drain and shakier and shakier elections, I would hold on to a mantra:

“I’m still optimistic about Turkey in the long term, the term just got a little longer”

I still believe that. But the term has gotten so long that I’m no longer sure that I’ll live to see a happier Turkey.

Many of the fundamentals I laid out in the video above, almost a decade ago, still hold true today. Turkey is a big country, that has moved up the industrial value chain in interesting ways. The West of the country is filled with dynamic cities where most of the population lives, where comfortable majorities are now quite sick of Erdoğan and his AK party. As I predicted, the opposition party won numerous elections in those cities in 2019 and 2024, despite Erdoğan’s tightening control of Turkey’s national government and media.

The problem here is the same one Turkey has had since Obama and Erdoğan decided to “Get Assad” in 2011, at the very least exacerbating the Syrian Civil War, if not starting it. US and Russian provoked crises across the region make strongman government in Turkey useful to US and European militarists. So the kinds of scrutiny and push-back Erdoğan would have gotten in a time of peace have never materialized. A range of institutions and relationships from the Customs Union with the EU, the European Court of Human Rights, NATO, and the US government more broadly, that would have done a lot more to stop Erdoğan if he weren’t so damn useful, have let Turkey fall into dictatorship. Biden wasn’t quite as openly in love with Turkey’s president as Trump is, but he also cared more about his wars than he cared about Turkish democracy.

I still believe a better, post-Erdoğan Turkey is possible. But it’s going to be very hard to achieve in a region we keep setting on fire. Erdoğan is 72. The chances of some kind of succession are not acutely high, but they increase every year. A lot depends on what’s happening in the region when he goes. Is the US going to want to help refresh Turkish democracy? Or are we going to be looking for another strong man to hold the place together in service to a bunch of dumb wars?

The term for long-term Turkey optimism just keeps getting longer.

Erdoğan has done a lot of bad things. But the very real silver lining is that he has resolved one of the central tensions of the Turkish Republic. Atatürk, Turkey’s heroic founder, dragged the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire into the 20th century, kicking and screaming. In doing so he saved the country from being swallowed up by foreign invaders. He built a modern military and society that kept Turkey independent and relatively unscathed through the second world war and the Cold War.

But Atatürk’s secularism and western focus, as essential to the country’s survival as it was, set up serious tensions in the country. He dearly wanted to set up representative democracy similar to the Western countries he admired. But whenever he and his successors tried, they’d bump into the inconvenient fact that many, sometimes most of their countrymen wanted a more religious and traditional country.

Long after Atatürk’s death, into the 1990s, a pattern would repeat. Democracy would always clash with the old elite. There were many other issues as well, but religion would always be in the background, keeping Turkey from reaching its full potential. Well, thanks to Erdoğan that tension has largely been resolved. Islam finally won in Turkey. Religion has gone about as far as it can go in the country, and folks are pretty sick of it.

Whenever we get to the post-Erdoğan era, the religious issue will have been settled. Or at least it will have reached a new, much less damaging equilibrium. Turkey’s Government is unlikely to ever be as disrespectful of Islam as it was in the past. But Turkey has also been inoculated against a more radical turn. Islam is now a respected part of life in Turkey. A few generations hence I suspect it will have faded as much as Christianity has in Europe. Resolving this central tension in Turkish society will be Erdoğan’s greatest legacy.

It’d be nice if we were able to move on to Erdoğan’s legacy phase. It’d be nice to know how long the term in the “I’m optimistic for Turkey in the long term” will eventually be.

So like most Turkey watchers, I sit back and wait.

You can listen to today’s podcast on Spotify, or you can watch it on YouTube below: