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A young protester is holding a banner with a photo of Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan during the demonstration. Protests in Ankara continue into their fifth day following the arrest of Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality Mayor, Ekrem Imamoglu.
Erdogan silences protests in Turkey
Erdogan is now back foranother round of political hardball. Imamoglu was formally arrested on corruption allegations on Sunday. If convicted, he will not be allowed to run for president. Protests have erupted around the country.
The CHP, which claims the arrest is a politically motivated move to spare Erdogan from his most popular critic, formally named Imamoglu as its presidential candidate on Sunday. The party has also called for a boycott of media companies that don’t air coverage of the protests, and lists of companies with close ties to the government have been spreading via WhatsApp groups.
Erdogan, in power now for more than two decades, will probably face down this challenge. Opposition-friendly journalists have beendetained, and Turkey’s Interior Ministry announced on Monday that1,133 protesters were arrested between March 19 and 23. Authorities have also moved to knock opposition figures off social media. Erdogan’s dominance of the state bureaucracy, police, military, the country’s judiciary, and its largest media companies will probably help him tamp down any larger groundswell of support for Imamoglu around the country.Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan poses with Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud and Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed following a press conference in Ankara, Turkey, December 11, 2024.
Turkey mediates key agreement to defuse Ethiopia-Somalia conflict
Ethiopian President Abiy Ahmed and Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud announced a critical agreement to end a yearlong dispute over Ethiopia’s access to the Arabian Sea. The leaders announced the deal in Ankara after marathon talks mediated by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, whois increasingly emerging as a key player in the Horn of Africa.
What’s the conflict all about? Ethiopia has been the most populous landlocked country in the world since Eritrea broke away in 1993, and the lack of a major seaport has held back development. In January, Ethiopia signed a deal to lease a port from a breakaway region in Somalia, Somaliland, in exchange for recognizing its independence. In response, Somalia threatened to expel Ethiopian troops that are in the country to fight al-Shabab terrorists, and some feared the conflict could escalate into an echo of the devastating 1977-78 Ogaden War.
Why is Turkey involved? Ankara has deep ties to both sides in the conflict and an abiding interest in keeping the peace between them. Turkey’s largest overseas military base is in Somalia, where Turkish troops have trained thousands of their Somali peers. Turkey also backed the Ethiopian government during the 2020-22 Tigray war by providing feared Bayraktar drones.
“The agreement will help make Turkey into an even more relevant power in the region, with Ankara pitching itself as a security partner for African countries,” says Eurasia Group expert Emre Peker.
Turkish businesses have invested over $2 billion in Ethiopia as well, a figure surpassed only by China.
“Aside from expanding its diplomatic and political clout in Africa, the deal will also help Turkey build more commercial inroads in the region,” says Peker. “Ethiopian access to Somali ports could facilitate more trade, and Turkish businesses will benefit from potential preferential treatment on marquee infrastructure projects.”
What now? Representatives will meet again in February for “technical talks” that are meant to hammer out the details of port access.
Ian Bremmer on Assad's fall
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take:
A Quick Take over the weekend. Yet again, because there is entirely too much blowing up around the world. Here, I want to focus on Syria where just a few hours ago Bashar Assad, the dictator, forced out, overthrown by a large number of militarily strong opposition forces led by the radical Islamist group HTS.
A lot to talk about here. This whole thing lasted less than two weeks, and initially the Russians and the Iranians provided military support for Assad, but his complete inability of his army to fight and offer resistance, and the distraction that the Russians have, they're stretched-thin from their fighting in Ukraine, from the Iranians providing support to resistance forces that are doing very badly against Israel, particularly Hezbollah and Lebanon, meant there wasn't all that much capacity, or even that much political will, to provide support. And so, Assad has been overthrown.
By itself that's good news, in the sense that this has been an incredibly repressive regime fighting initially a war against their own people. The pro-democracy movement that came out of the Arab Spring and has led to over 500,000 Syrians dead over the last decade, over 200,000 of them civilians, and some 6 million refugees, both fleeing into neighboring Arab states but also into Europe, into Turkey, and of course in Germany, which is part of the reason that Merkel ended up leaving her terms in ignominy. That is the initial background.
And there has been a lot of support for various opposition groups in Syria, from Turkey, most notably from the UAE, from Saudi Arabia, and from the United States, while the Assad government was being supported principally by the Russians in terms of air support, some intelligence, some cyber capabilities, and from the Iranians on the ground, particularly the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. And that was largely enough through the majority of this war. The rebel groups by 2018 had retreated into the northwest, this Idlib region. And by that point, the rebels that were left were mostly led by ISIS, and that meant a common enemy on the part of the United States.
And Turkey had turned from Assad to the proximate Syrian part of the war on terror. And if that had failed, it had the potential to turn Syria and neighboring Iraq into a terrorist state. ISIS lost that battle. Assad consolidated most of Syria under his regime. And then about four years ago, Turkey and Russia brokered a ceasefire in Idlib, which was at that point under opposition control.
That brings us to today, and to HTS, which stands for Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham. It's a former Al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria that has since formally cut their ties with the terrorists, but they're still called a terrorist organization, labeled one by the United States and its allies in NATO. And they are the de facto leader of the armed opposition and led the now ouster of Assad. Now, they've become kind of Hezbollah-like in the sense that they're providing a lot of Syrian citizens with government services. They've managed to coordinate rebels and eliminate infighting underneath that, and they've also promised to protect Syrian Christians and Muslim Alawites and have gotten the tacit support of the Turkish Erdoğan government, who basically gave them at least a blinking yellow if not a green light to go ahead and launch this war against Assad two weeks ago.
Now, having said all of that, the likelihood that they're going to run as a secular government, Syria, seems unlikely to me. This is, we're going from Assad to what is probably going to be a radical Islamist government that'll be repressive and that'll be deeply challenging. And so I don't think that is in any way, at least at this point, something that we can call a transition that's good news or that we shouldn't feel anxiety about. But what is clear is that the Iranians and Russians have lost. So the axis of resistance is not looking like much of an axis and it's not putting up very much resistance. The Russians, Putin has said nothing about this. He's not made a public statement, and that's not surprising. Frequently when he is surprised and he faces sudden embarrassing losses, he doesn't say anything about it to his people. And if you look at Russian state media, they've been talking about France, and South Korea, and Trump, and all those things, but almost no coverage of Syria, where the Russians have lost an ally and they've lost a military base that's important to them in Tartus and they've not been able to put up much of a fight.
Now, the good news there is that if you're Putin, you should be more cognizant of the fact that there are major costs of continuing to fight an incredibly bloody war in Ukraine where you're making some gains, territorially, but you're losing huge numbers of Russian citizens. And so if Trump is coming in and says he wants to cut a deal, Putin should be more incented to do that. There's also good news on the Iranian front in the sense that Syria falling means that they no longer have a corridor to provide military support for Hezbollah. And that means that the two-month ceasefire, which has been announced by the Israelis and by the Lebanese government, is more likely to hold.
Now, if you put those two things together, kind of interesting. Looks more likely that Trump gets inaugurated, and he is indeed able to announce that the temporary ceasefire becomes a permanent end of the war between Israel and Hezbollah, and that he's able to negotiate a ceasefire between the Russians and Ukrainians that does not give up the store to Putin. The former is an easier bet than the latter, but both of them certainly look more likely on the back of Assad being ousted.
The bad news? More challenges, more humanitarian degradation for the Syrian people on the ground. Could easily see another million refugees on the back of the fighting that we've had, depending on what happens with governance going forward. There are very few hospitals that are presently functioning. There is very limited humanitarian aid on the ground, that's necessary in very short order. And it's hard to say that fighting isn't going to break out amongst the various factions that have held together in fighting a common enemy, if that's going to lead to coherent governance going forward, it depends so much on what happens when HTS becomes not the leader of a rebel group but suddenly is responsible for governance on the ground in Syria. And your guess is as good as anyone as to what is going to happen there.
So, that is the best I can tell where we are right now. It's a fascinating issue and a temporary expansion of the war in the Middle East, but hopefully one that we can see bringing a little bit of stability to some other conflicts that are happening in the region and more broadly. That's it for me, and I'll talk to you all real soon.
- Podcast: Syria, The Rise and Fallout of the House of Assad with Sam Dagher ›
- Syrian rebels reignite war, make advances in Aleppo ›
- Once frozen out, Bashar Assad is back in ›
- Do strikes on Syria signal a bolder Netanyahu? ›
- The Graphic Truth: How a decade of war has crushed Syria ›
- Tragedy upon tragedy in war-torn Syria ›
Syrian rebel forces take Aleppo
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take:
Hi everybody. Ian Bremmer here and a Quick Take, post-run, on a Sunday because the news does not wait for us to get back from our extended Thanksgiving weekend.
I want to talk about a new front in the Middle East war that has just opened up in Syria, a country that is far from stable and not really a country, really a patchwork of different controls in the best of times. But now we have active war fighting, a new front opening up with lots of territory being taken from Bashar al-Assad, his dictatorial regime from Syria Rebels, particularly a group called HTS, which is the most powerful of the military opposition groups in the country. They have swept, in a matter of hours, through the country, taking over Aleppo, the major city, and moving towards Hama. There is lots of humanitarian concern here. Not a surprise. You don't have hospitals functioning in Aleppo. You've got all sorts, thousands and thousands of people fleeing and nowhere obvious to go.
This should not be an enormous surprise in the sense that HTS has been agitating the Turkish government who support them to march on Aleppo for months. And in the same way that the Iranians had been green-lighting support for all of their proxies across the region to engage in strikes against the United States, against Israel, against shipping, all of that, Turkey did not want to do that. They didn't want to back and offensive. They were pretty split on it. The hawks inside Erdogan's government in Turkey, like the idea in order to expand opposition, put more pressure on a side, facilitate the return of more Syrian refugees from Turkey back into Syria, and also strengthen Erdogan's hand in bringing Assad back to the negotiating table for a normalization of ties under Turkey's terms. But a lot of people inside Turkey were saying that Russia would carpet bomb Turkish-backed forces and Turkish forces on the ground in Syria, of which there are thousands, which would humiliate Erdogan and cause broader tension with Russia that could well have major economic implications. We've seen that before, and this is a time when Turkey doesn't really want to afford that. They're trying to rebuild their economy from what has been a lot of damage.
It looks like now Ankara has given the go ahead to these militants in Syria, in part because the geopolitics of the region is changing. The Russians, of course, are themselves very distracted, not just with an ongoing war in Ukraine, which has been happening for three years now, but specifically because they've got two months to take as much land as possible, put the Ukrainians in the worst possible position before Trump is president and says he wants to end that war. So in other words, everything they have, they're really now putting into that fight against Ukraine.
Meanwhile, the Iranian-supported proxies across the region are getting utterly hammered, as we've seen from the United States, and more importantly from Israel and the successful war against Hezbollah in Lebanon. So in that regard, the changing of the geopolitics has really given the upper hands of the hawks in Turkey to tell HTS, "Go for it. This is an opportunity, unique time to improve your position." Still, they're not fully backing the offensive. They're not backing it directly militarily, nor are they fully backing it diplomatically as they did, for example, with the Free Syrian Army, the FSA, with number of cross border operations in Northern Syria in the past decade.
Now, Russia has been humiliated on the ground. These Syrian troops in Aleppo folded and ran away immediately. The Russians have sacked senior soldiers in charge of operations on the ground, and it looks like they are preparing to send troops into Syria directly in the next 24 to 48 hours to shore up Assad. There's a lot of land that HTS would have to take before they were a direct threat to regime. Hard to imagine they're going to be able to overthrow him. Also, the Iranians are providing support. We already see that Islamic Revolutionary Guard Core, aligned militias across the region, are saying they will enter Syria to engage in the fight against HTS in favor of the Assad regime. I expect you'll see significant numbers of actual IRGC advisors showing up as well.
So it doesn't look like this is the end of Assad, and frankly, it's hard to imagine that Turkey itself even wants to have Assad out because filling the void completely left by a weakened Iran would be challenging for Turkey and would also lead to more conflict with the Russians, rather, who importantly have a military base, a port in Tartus that is very important for them having influence in the Mediterranean. Rather, Turkey is trying to use this space to try to shape regional events to their benefits. It's very positive what's happened so far in the last 48 hours for Turkey. It weakens Assad, makes him more open to a bad deal with Turkey than he has been before, and further, HTS is also moving farther away from Turkey's border, which is a good thing because Ankara doesn't have full control over them. Again, like Iran with its proxies, a lot of weapons, a lot of diplomatic support, but that's very different from operational control on the ground. And I expect that Erdogan sees this as an opportunity for Trump where he says, "We'll, cut a deal with you. You, Trump, get to exit Syria." Still with American troops on the ground there, yet one more place you can say that the Americans don't need to be, don't need to fight and have an America First policy and one more war that you get to formally not be a part of. And we, Turkey will make sure that there's no ISIS-affiliated organizations on the ground, that the region is more stable, that Iranian influences curtailed, and the Shia crescent is severed."
So if it works, one stone, lots of birds for Erdogan. The danger of course is that it doesn't work and that the war expands and that we end up with Russia versus Turkey in a proxy war that can become direct between the two. Wouldn't be the first time that we've seen that kind of confrontation. That'd be a lot more problematic. But at this point, the one thing I can say is that this is much more about the proxies fighting in a vacuum with a changing geopolitical balance than it is about the likelihood that Assad is about to be out. He wasn't out when Obama said, "Assad must go." He's not likely to be out right now.
Okay, that's it for me. We'll keep following this and I'll talk to you all real soon.
Turkey's President Tayyip Erdogan attends the NATO leaders summit in Vilnius, Lithuania.
How Erdogan won the NATO Summit
This week’s NATO Summit in Vilnius is now over. So, who won?
It’s not Ukraine. NATO leaders bathed President Volodymyr Zelensky in waves of warm words and historic-sounding promises. But, as we wrote a day ago, none of that brings his country much closer to the NATO membership he wants. (That said, Ukraine isn’t really a loser, because neither immediate membership nor a timetable to join were ever in the cards.)
Certainly, Sweden is a winner — thanks to Turkey’s willingness to drop its threat to veto the country’s own entrance into NATO. Sweden will become the alliance’s 32nd member by the end of the year.
Russia’s government will declare itself a winner by pointing to (exaggerated) headlines that suggested Ukrainian and NATO leaders spent the week arguing. But the Kremlin’s already hollow win — and its claims of Ukrainian-Western frictions — were undermined when news broke that Ukraine had used a UK-supplied missile to kill a high-ranking Russian general deep inside Russian territory.
The true summit winner is Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He exited the event with a spring in his step …
… by earning concessions from Sweden, which will now back the expansion of a free trade agreement between the EU and Turkey. Sweden has also recently amended its Constitution to pass new counterterrorism legislation that Erdogan demanded, and agreed to extradite some of the Turks who’ve been charged with crimes by Ankara.
… by reminding Europe, Turkey’s largest export market, that he’s worth bargaining with. Erdogan’s support for Ukraine — including by selling Kyiv military drones — has won praise in Europe. But Erdogan remains the one NATO leader of consequence who can speak directly with Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Both these things bolster Erdogan’s importance for the alliance, but his willingness to lift objections to Sweden’s entry, as he did for Finland, has earned him much goodwill, at least for now.
…by reminding Putin he’s not a pushover. At times, Russia has appeared to bully Erdogan’s government. In 2016, in response to Turkey shooting down a Russian fighter plane over Syria in November 2015, Putin inflicted real damage on Turkey’s economy by blocking Russian tourists from visiting. By voting for NATO enlargement, Erdogan reminds Putin that Turkey still has partners far more powerful than Russia.
…by winning a promise he can buy F-16s from the United States. In 2017, Turkey defied US objections and bought surface-to-air missile systems from Russia. Washington then responded with sanctions. But by greenlighting Sweden’s bid to join NATO, Turkey will soon be allowed to buy US-made fighter jets that are badly needed to upgrade Turkey’s air force. And that’s over the objections of many in Washington, who feel Erdogan’s history of jailing journalists and undermining democratic institutions in Turkey should have prevented the deal.
… and by showing Turkish voters that he’s still a major international player.
There is one last twist. Erdogan has decided to make Sweden sweat a little longer by saying Turkey’s parliament won’t officially vote on the Nordic country’s NATO membership until October.
When haggling with the Turkish president, nothing ever comes easy.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson shake hands next to NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg in Vilnius, Lithuania.
NATO at 32. How about 33?
One of the biggest questions hanging over the NATO summit this week in Vilnius has already been answered: Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan agreed on Monday to remove his block on Sweden’s bid to join the alliance. The fear created by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine led Finland to join the alliance in April, bringing NATO to 31 members. Sweden will now make it 32.
Erdogan had opposed Sweden’s path over complaints that Stockholm had given sanctuary to Kurds he considers terrorists. Some analysts have speculated that Turkey’s president would drop objections in exchange for the right to purchase F16 fighter jets from the United States. We’ll see now whether that deal goes through.
The other question looming over the summit is whether Ukraine might win a promise to make Ukraine member no. 33. US President Joe Biden has already taken immediate membership off the table, at least for now, with the argument that NATO can’t accept a member at war. We understand, said Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky on Monday, “but we need a clear signal, and this signal is needed right now.”
This larger question of how NATO leaders will use the event to signal not just open-ended military and financial support for Ukraine – but also a concrete path to future membership – will be closely watched in Russia, Europe, and the US.
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan waves as he addresses his supporters in Ankara following his victory in the second round of the presidential election.
Erdogan wins reelection — what's next for Turkey?
Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan won Sunday's presidential runoff election, beating opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu by a not-too-shabby 4 percentage points in a deeply polarized country. It’s a big victory for Erdogan, who ahead of the first round many thought would finally lose — yet eventually defying the polls to advance, win another term, and enter his third decade in power.
For the next five years, Erdogan will be "politically unencumbered" as his party also won a majority in parliament, Eurasia Group senior analyst Emre Peker explains in this Twitter thread. That will likely mean the Turkish leader will double down on some of his most divisive policies to please his base, including what to do with Syrian refugees.
Things are not looking good for the economy. The lira crashed after Erdogan's runoff victory, as investors fear the president will try to get the country out of its economic crisis with more of his unorthodox policies known as Erdonomics. The same goes for the state of Turkish democracy, while on foreign policy expect Erdogan to continue his delicate balancing act between the West and, well, the enemies of the West.
In Peker's words: "Quite an explosive mix — politically for Erdogan, and personally for all Turkey."
Turkey’s sultan Erdogan is not going anywhere
Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan is … strong.
Despite most opinion polls predicting a win for main-opposition candidate Kemal Kilicdaroglu, a soft-spoken technocrat who leads the secularist Republican People’s Party (CHP), President Erdogan received 49.5% of the votes in Sunday’s presidential election compared to Kilicdaroglu’s 44.9%. Erdogan’s Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its People’s Alliance coalition, meanwhile, defied expectations to retain majority control of Turkey’s 600-member parliament.
On paper, the election was the most serious challenge of Erdogan’s 20-year iron rule.
Turkey’s economy is in shambles, plagued by soaring inflation, a plummeting lira, and a cost-of-living crisis at least partly caused by Erdogan’s kooky economic policies. The government’s shambolic response to February’s deadly earthquake in southeastern Turkey (which killed 50,000 and displaced 1.5 million), added to the AKP’s many corruption and mismanagement scandals, created more headwinds for the president. And, for the first time in ages, Turkey’s notoriously fractious opposition managed to unite behind a joint candidate able to broaden the bloc’s appeal, giving voters a credible alternative to Erdogan.
All this explains why almost every part of the country shifted against Erdogan relative to the most recent presidential election in 2018, forcing the president to a run-off for the first time in two decades.
But while his dominance has slipped, Erdogan remains the most popular leader in Turkey. He has outlived economic downturns, refugee crises, corruption scandals, protest movements, and even a coup attempt. He is a skilled populist with ample experience leveraging the bully pulpit, stoking nationalist sentiment, and exploiting identity politics and security concerns in his favor.
Having dismantled most independent checks on his power (including the military, the judiciary, and the media) and expanded presidential powers, Erdogan’s electoral strength is further underpinned by his incumbency advantages, which allow him to dominate the airwaves and use state levers to woo voters and weaken opponents. Yes, Turkey's election was free ... but it certainly wasn’t fair.
This is why I expected him to clinch reelection, despite polling data showing as much as a five-percentage-point lead for Kilicdaroglu ahead of the first-round vote.
What’s next
While Erdogan came half a point short of the 50% he needed to avoid a runoff, he is the overwhelming favorite to secure the presidency in the second round on May 28.
The math is simple. Erdogan was within just 275,000 votes of winning the presidency outright on Sunday, whereas Kilicdaroglu’s shortfall was 2.8 million. The president will carry that 2.5 million advantage into the runoff, where Kilicdaroglu would need to not only increase or at least maintain his turnout – a huge hurdle given the demoralizing impact of his Sunday losses – but also win virtually all the voters who backed the far-right nationalist Sinan Ogan (5.2%) and the populist Muharrem Ince (0.4%) in order to unseat Erdogan. That’s not going to happen.
Ince had surprisingly withdrawn from the race three days before the vote but remained on the ballot. Most of his supporters are protest or anti-establishment voters who won’t head to the polls for the runoff. Even if they did, at less than 250,000 votes they wouldn’t move the needle for Kilicdaroglu.
Ogan, on the other hand, drew his 2.8 million votes roughly evenly from both Erdogan and Kilicdaroglu. Among them, nationalist voters who typically vote for the Erdogan-allied Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) or the ruling AKP will be highly motivated to cast their ballots for the incumbent to prevent a Kilicdaroglu presidency. But backers of the opposition-aligned, Turkish nationalist Good Party (IYI) are less likely to turn out to support Kilicdaroglu.
Ogan himself has said he’d only endorse the opposition leader if he distances himself from his Kurdish supporters, playing into Erdogan’s baseless accusations that Kilicdaroglu is “backed by terrorists.” But Kilicdaroglu can’t risk alienating the Kurdish vote, which makes up around 10% of Turkey’s electorate.
These numbers alone give Erdogan a nigh insurmountable edge. And that’s before you even get to the campaign trail, where the president will use his incumbency powers and scare tactics to energize his base, depress opposition turnout, and tilt the balance further in his favor.
Why it matters
A victorious Erdogan will be emboldened to double down on the playbook that has hollowed out Turkey’s democracy, turned its economy into a basket case, and distanced it from its traditional Western allies.
The president’s insistence on unorthodox economic policies will prove unsustainable sooner rather than later, pushing the country toward a full-blown economic crisis it’ll have a hard time recovering from.
Little by little, one-man rule will replace the rule of law as Erdogan makes himself sultan for life, pushing Turkey ever closer to autocracy and away from representative democracy.
Abroad, Erdogan will continue his delicate balancing act as he seeks to expand Turkey’s global clout, deepening ties with Russia and China to the chagrin of its longstanding allies, the United States and Europe.
Despite growing mistrust and tension, Turkey’s economic and security dependence on the West means relations will continue to be ruled by pragmatism. Erdogan will continue to both expand trade with Russia and support Ukraine and avoid Western sanctions. He will ratify Sweden’s membership in NATO but only once the US finally agrees to sell him F-16 fighter jets. He will keep Turkey in NATO but increasingly act as a spoiler.
This approach to foreign policy will help cement Turkey’s role as a geopolitical swing state (see today’s Moose treat), but it will also make Ankara a more unreliable ally and increase the risk of miscalculation. As we’ve seen in Russia and China, extreme consolidation of power, centralization of decision-making, and suppression of dissent are a recipe for bad policies. Unchallenged power means unchallenged ability to make mistakes.
A third Erdogan term will bring about a more unstable, authoritarian, and unpredictable Turkey. Short of a miracle on May 28, the future of Turkey looks bleak.