Dear Önder,
He has survived an attempted coup. He has weathered several waves of civic protests.
And most recently, he won yet another election despite his administration’s corruption and mismanagement after a devastating earthquake in February left more than 50,000 dead and destroyed so much of central-southern Turkey.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan is definitely a political survivor.
Of course, he hasn’t relied on popularity alone to win elections. His ruling party has built a durable patronage system, jailed political opponents, and controlled much of the media.
Erdogan has followed the recipe of many putatively democratic autocrats, like Vladimir Putin in Russia and Viktor Orban in Hungary, who have remained in power for years and years by similarly rigging the system to their benefit.
The only possibly positive outcome of the Turkish election is Erdogan’s ability to mediate between Russia and Ukraine. Moreover, if there is to be any kind of transatlantic security order that somehow accommodates both NATO and Russia, Erdogan will prove the indispensable figure. Turkey is one of the only NATO members to buy weapons systems recently from Russia.
But discontent in Turkey will not disappear simply because Erdogan won an election. The Turkish economy is in dire straits. Erdogan would like to portray himself as a second Ataturk. But he may instead end up leading Turkey into a second Ottoman dead end: impoverished, corrupt, and marginal.
In Serbia, President Aleksandar Vučić is also a political survivor, having led the country as president or prime minister for about a decade. But as Mira Oklobdzija reports in Foreign Policy In Focus this week, Vučić’s opposition to the new anti-violence demonstrations in the country may be his ultimate undoing.
Finally, in my World Beat column, I take a look at the impact of Russia’s war on the Ukrainian environment.
Although the Russian invasion has pushed Europe and other parts of the world to accelerate their transitions away from fossil fuels, the war has destroyed much of Ukraine’s energy system, including its renewable sector, and polluted huge swaths of the country. In the article, two leading Ukrainian climate activists calculate the impact and discuss how the country is already trying to build back better.
John Feffer
Director, FPIF
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