Turkey has begun to take on a new geostrategic significance for the major global powers, even as its economy enters a period of growing fragility and its polity becomes increasingly divided.
The May 14 presidential and parliamentary elections in Turkey, regardless of the outcome, were unlikely to stop severe pain coming to the Turkish population. Diminished national strategic capacity—due to years of economic mismanagement and political alienation of neighbors and allies, as well as the February earthquake—have meant that any new government would face decades of challenges.
In the early morning of May 15, Turkey’s Supreme Election Council (YSK) stated that the election for the presidency would be forced to a runoff on May 28, although the parliamentary election had given a majority to the outgoing Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi (Justice and Development Party, or AK Party).
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had taken 49.4 percent of the initial vote—therefore just missing an absolute majority—and principal opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi/Republican People’s Party, or CHP) had received 44.96 percent of the vote.
The runoff voting on May 28 will likely see votes for Sinan Ogan (Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi/Nationalist Movement Party, or MHP) (5.2 percent) up for grabs but by no means guaranteed to all go to Kilicdaroglu.
External and internal observers of the election had hoped that the election would mark the end of Turkey’s problems, but this clearly wasn’t going to be the case, regardless of the outcome. The elections were unlikely to change the fact that the country would remain, for the foreseeable future, separate from but dependent on both the NATO/West bloc and the Eurasian bloc.
Turkey remains the vital geopolitical dividing line between the West and the Eurasian bloc at a time when the world has repolarized, particularly since the Russia–Ukraine war began in February 2022, leaving Turkey uncomfortably caught between the two global power structures. But Turkey is also presently the sole secure key trade bridge, via the Caspian Sea, between the independent Central Asian states with markets and suppliers in the outside world; this is the dominant feature of the strategic landscape moving forward.
How effectively pressure is exerted on Turkey over the coming months and years by Washington, Moscow, or Beijing will likely determine whether or to what degree the country will be helpful to its largely Turkic landlocked brethren in the Central Asian states of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan in trading with the outside world via the Caspian Sea and Azerbaijan to Turkey and the outside world.
The Central Asian states now provide the most significant strategic advantage the West could leverage in the new cold war to act as a wedge between Russia and China. This was a geopolitical advantage denied to the West during the Cold War.
This fact alone made the outcome of the 2023 Turkish elections critical to the global strategic architecture going forward. A victory for outgoing Erdogan would continue the ambiguity of the situation, increasingly evident over the past two decades of his governance. A victory for opposition leader Kilicdaroglu would revitalize Turkish–Western relations to some degree. Still, the situation surrounding Turkey has changed such that even a new pro-Western government in Ankara—should it be elected on May 28—would have more limited options than in the past.
And even if Kilicdaroglu wins the presidency, the unicameral Türkiye Buyuk Millet Meclisi (Grand National Assembly) would be in the hands of the AKP, resisting the new president.
In any event, no Turkish government moving forward can break from its dependency on Russia or China (nor from the European Union or the United States), as frustrating as this has been to the outgoing government. And this chafing has meant that Ankara has attempted to assert itself whenever possible by demonstrating its potential to threaten or disrupt.
Moscow and Beijing are unlikely to allow the West easy access to Turkish leadership going forward, and their position, running the Eurasian bloc, gives them unique control over Turkey’s neighbor, Iran, for the time being.
Erdogan had hoped to elevate Turkey to major power status through strategic gambles. Still, a consistent series of failed policies has meant that the economic momentum has peaked before a breakthrough could occur. That doesn’t diminish Turkey’s strategic geographic positioning, which makes it not only critical to the United States and NATO and to the new Eurasian bloc of Russia and China but now also the critical element for the emerging Central Asian grouping of states.
So the May 14 presidential and parliamentary elections—although critical to the strategic direction of the country, the region, and, to a degree, the global balance over the coming few years—are bound by a number of competing imperatives.
From a domestic stance, many observers had anticipated that Erdogan would have devised methods to avoid having to surrender office. He still may do so. Certainly, he had retained considerable support, particularly in rural areas. Still, all the indicators of the economy—reflected in opinion polling—gave the edge to the opposition, combined largely for the first time around a single candidate, Kilicdaroglu.
Two other candidates were also contesting the first round of the election but, as expected, didn’t gain a substantial share of the vote.
Regardless of the outcome, Turkey faces a distinctly challenging near-term future. An Erdogan victory would almost certainly be regarded as questionable by much of the opposition and would further polarize the electorate. A Kilicdaroglu victory would do little to persuade the rural population who have supported the increasingly xenophobic policies of the outgoing government.
The major differences, internally, would be evident in the degree and timespan of pain the electorate would suffer.
The outgoing government, while fueling underlying inflation and the decline in the value of the Turkish lira, had introduced compensating social relief programs. Still, these have been of declining impact as economic realities bite. A win for Kilicdaroglu—KK, as he’s known—would result in a short-term introduction of measures to salvage the economy and rebuild the value of the lira.
This would be painful because interest rates would need to rise substantially to rein in inflation, and the credit-based expansion of the economy that Erdogan introduced had made much of Turkish society dependent on borrowings, which would now become more expensive.
Domestically, the problems are so severe that any new leader would be tempted to seek some distraction through international actions. With some success, Erdogan claimed that Turkey’s problems were merely a reflection of the global economic problems faced equally by all other states, even though this was patently untrue.
Despite such distracting patriotic gestures as changing the name of the country when expressed in English from Turkey to Türkiye (the national name in the Turkish language), the reality is that it was Erdogan’s policies—counter to economic orthodoxy—that had led the country to see inflation at an official level of more than 85 percent (now down to some 44 percent, although private analysts place inflation still at more than 100 percent). The value of the lira has declined precipitously and, combined with inflation, has robbed the Turkish population of any gains that Erdogan’s grandiose defense and industrial schemes had promised.
Moreover, fear of a coup had caused Erdogan to delay any meaningful response to the earthquake of Feb. 6 in southern and central Turkey and northern and western Syria, with more than 10,000 aftershocks in the three weeks after. The Turkish death toll exceeded 50,000, and reconstruction costs were estimated to be more than $104 billion, about an eighth of Turkey’s gross domestic product. So the country faces a massive domestic recovery demand from this event, let alone from inflation and the lira’s decline.
Under a continued Erdogan government, it should be expected that funds would continue to be diverted to “prestige” military projects, and these would continue to threaten neighboring Greece, Cyprus, Syria, and Israel at various times. But even a Kilicdaroglu presidency would find it difficult to make short-term cuts in these projects. However, military spending would level off, and greater attempts would be made to end the confrontational stance of Turkey toward its neighbors.
Such a calming of tensions with neighbors would be welcomed by the United States/West, Russia, and China—but there’s a debate on how much this would change the fundamental strategic balance. In any event, the earthquake and other factors have already meant that Erdogan’s threats to Greece, Cyprus, and Syria have begun to lose their teeth. Turkey has lost much of its strategic depth and resilience to seriously consider a possible conflict with any of its neighbors.
Its economic strength and its political importance lie to a significant degree in how well it can capitalize on its trade route offering to Central Asia and Azerbaijan. But this is fraught with so many difficulties that the Central Asian states are already desperate to develop alternate trade routes that remove some of the dependency on trading with the outside world via Russia or China.
This restores the centrality of Afghanistan—and a resolution to some degree of the instability there—as a trade link between Central Asia and the outside world. Certainly, despite its internal policies, the Taliban government of Afghanistan has been keen to ensure the security of trucking routes from Tashkent, Uzbekistan, down to Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province and down to the Indian Ocean ports of Karachi and Gwadar.
Road freight traffic from Uzbekistan to Pakistan via Afghanistan has increased substantially during the first months of 2023, with no reported disruptions.
But even that route is tenuous and threatened in the medium term by the prospect of Indian military action against Pakistan at some stage in the foreseeable future.
In essence, the Great Game for Central Asia has now fully revived on a much larger scale than the 18th and 19th centuries, but with all the players having limited intellectual and physical resources to truly play the game.
