Erdoğan’s position is starting to look shaky

Turkey’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has never been so weak – nor so strong. At home, he is facing the most potent challenge to his power since an armed coup in 2016, in the form of a serious electoral challenger whom he has just jailed, causing massive protests and unsettling the money markets. Internationally, though, he has never been stronger. Every major power bloc in the world, it seems, needs Turkey’s help, with issues ranging from immigration to peacekeeping and energy supplies.

For Europe, Erdoğan remains a major gas supplier and an essential bulwark against immigrants from Syria and Afghanistan. Turkey is a powerful NATO member with a 350,000-strong army and a booming defense industry, which could play a leading role in rearming Europe and participating in a peacekeeping force in Ukraine. For Russia, Erdoğan has played a key middleman role in Black Sea shipping negotiations with Kyiv, while Turkey remains a major export route for Russian gas. It has refused to sign up to European sanctions and remains a key trading partner of Moscow’s. Yet Turkey remains an ally and trading partner of Ukraine, with a company owned by Erdoğan’s son-in-law supplying the country’s Bayraktar-TB2 drones.

Most important are Erdoğan’s continued strong relations with the US. Turkey remains an essential (though not wholly reliable) ally in Syria and against Iran. Donald Trump is a big admirer of Erdoğan and reports suggest he could visit Washington soon. A recent conversation between the two leaders was described as “great” and “really transformational” by Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff.

Ekrem İmamoğlu, Erdoğan’s only opponent with a real chance of winning the next presidential election, was arrested two days after the Trump call. It was almost as if Erdoğan was testing the temperature of his relationship with Trump before making his fateful move. The gamble paid off. Washington’s pushback has been minimal.

“We would encourage Turkey to respect human rights and handle its internal framework appropriately,” said a State Department spokesperson as Erdoğan’s troops cracked heads and doused tens of thousands of protesters on the streets of Istanbul with tear gas. “But we will not comment on domestic issues.” Contrast this with the condemnation meted out by Washington and Brussels on Belarus in 2020 when Alexander Lukashenko used violence against protesters in Minsk. “This is happening because Erdoğan feels both threatened and emboldened,” says Soner Çagaptay, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “Threatened because İmamoğlu will defeat him, if free to run, and emboldened because, as far as the global community is concerned, [he] is free to do whatever he likes domestically.”

Erdoğan has spent years eroding democracy, eliminating opposition media, stifling dissent, packing the judiciary and purging Turkey’s army and civil service. Removing İmamoğlu is his most blatant power move yet. Judges appointed by Erdoğan’s ruling AK party had already stacked corrup- tion charges against İmamoğlu. University authorities had even rescinded his degree – rendering him technically ineligible to run for president. But his arrest and imprisonment was Erdoğan’s nuclear option. It came on the eve of İmamoğlu’s anointing as the official candidate of the main opposition Republican People’s party, or CHP.

The resulting protests, the biggest ever against Erdoğan, reflect İmamoğlu’s popularity and the disconnect between Istanbul and the Anatolian heartland, Erdoğan’s religious-conservative power base. The CHP chairman, Özgur Özel, described the arrest as a “coup” against the man they believe is Turkey’s next president. And 15 million people – the vast majority not even CHP party members – showed up over the weekend to symbolically vote for İmamoğlu as the CHP’s candidate. Instead of sinking his main rival’s candidacy, Erdoğan has created a martyr. He has also caused a run on the lira that wiped out 79 percent of the country’s foreign exchange reserves from last year in just three days and prompted a draconian month-long ban on short selling on the Istanbul stock exchange. This is by no means Erdoğan’s first rodeo. He has faced serious challenges before – and not shrunk from putting them down in brutal ways. In the wake of the 2016 coup attempt by the army, he imprisoned more than 100,000 people and launched a purge of the police, military and judiciary. During protests that broke out across Turkey in 2013 and snow- balled into a weeks-long anti-regime showdown between protesters and police, six people were killed and at least 7,478 injured.

European and US protests over that were pretty muted, too. The aftermath of the Arab Spring was under way, with Erdoğan’s diplomats playing firefighting roles, and Bashar al-Assad was continuing his bloody crackdown in Syria. The West has always placed pragmatic international relations ahead of defending Turkish democracy.

This time, though, Erdoğan’s authoritarian tendencies have been truly unleashed. His power has hitherto been tempered by regular elections which, despite media stifling and local rigging, still produced results that defied his government – for instance, for mayor of Istanbul in 2019 and 2024. Now, he seems to be tilting directly at two fundamental aspects of the legacy of Atatürk, founder of the Republic of Turkey: secularism and democracy.

Back in 1996, Erdoğan – himself then a popular opposition mayor of Istanbul – was quoted (though he has denied it) as saying that “democracy is like a tram – you ride it until you reach your destination.” Two years later, he was in jail for reciting a religious poem with the line “our minarets are our bayonets.” Though he was then banned from holding office because of that conviction, his AK party swept to power in 2002. Now, it seems, the democracy tram has taken him as far as he needs – to a place of absolute power comparable with that of Central Asia’s dictators.

The current geopolitical moment dictates that Turkey’s western allies – Atatürk’s onetime role models – turn a blind eye. But in truth, the death of the biggest Muslim democracy in the region should be ringing serious alarm bells across the free world.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s May 2025 World edition.