In a campaign stop on Sunday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan played a video that appeared to show a Kurdish militant leader backing his opponent, Kemal Kilicdaroglu.
“We will not allow Kilicdaroglu, who walks with terrorist organizations, to divide this homeland,” Erdogan said during a fiery speech.
Given the extent to which the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) is reviled among Turkey’s non-Kurdish electorate, the video seemed engineered to smear Kilicdaroglu of the Republican People’s Party (CHP). Subsequent reporting has found that the clip was, in fact, doctored to suggest ties between the CHP chief and Kurdish militants who the Turkish government considers terrorists.
The apparent forgery highlights the stakes of the election: After two decades as Turkey’s relatively unchallenged leader, Erdogan may actually lose power. But he’s not going down without a fight.
Recent polls show Kilicdaroglu with a slight lead ahead of Sunday’s vote. Some surveys even show the CHP leader winning in the first round, though most predict that the two frontrunners will sail through this weekend’s four-man tally before a second round showdown on May 28.
The election comes at a time of deep uncertainty in Turkey, which has faced years of spiraling inflation and a collapsing currency — a problem that was further exacerbated in February, when a pair of earthquakes devastated large swaths of the country’s southwest.
Many analysts have referred to the election as a referendum on Turkish democracy. Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) have made sweeping changes to Ankara’s system of government over the past 20 years, centralizing vast amounts of power in the hands of the president. The CHP’s trademark promise is to turn back the clock on those reforms and restore parliamentary democracy in the country.
Given this domestic context, it should come as no surprise that neither candidate has placed foreign policy at the center of their campaign. But, as Erdogan’s doctored video shows, national security issues are difficult to avoid in Turkish politics. And there are some key differences between the two candidates that could have significant implications for policymakers in the West, according to experts who spoke with RS.
Among other things, Kilicdaroglu has promised to put Turkey back on track to join the European Union. He has also pledged to comply with the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights, which would mean immediately releasing two prominent dissidents who the courts have ruled are political prisoners.
The opposition leader’s top foreign policy adviser has also said he would drop Turkey’s opposition to Sweden joining NATO. And he has said that Kilicdaroglu will “prioritize dialogue and a non-interventionist approach” to solving regional problems — a sharp departure from Erdogan’s more belligerent role in the Middle East.
But those hoping for a honeymoon in Turkish ties with the West will almost surely find themselves disappointed. Despite Kilicdaroglu’s focus on liberal democracy, he remains an ardent nationalist with little inclination to bend on issues that are “widely agreed upon by the Turkish population as Turkey’s genuine national interests,” according to Merve Tahiroglu of the Washington-based Project on Middle East Democracy.
In other words, Kilicdaroglu is not going to drop his country’s opposition to U.S. support for Kurdish groups in northern Syria, nor will he give up on efforts to extradite Fethullah Gulen, the religious leader and alleged mastermind of a 2016 coup attempt who has lived in exile in rural Pennsylvania since 1999. He also won’t put an end to Turkish efforts to divide Cyprus, a particularly thorny issue given that the island’s internationally recognized government is a member of the EU.
Kilicdaroglu will also raise hackles in the West with his plans to normalize relations with Syria as a first step toward returning Turkey’s 3.7 million Syrian refugees to their home country. (Erdogan has also endorsed efforts to repatriate Syrian refugees, but, given how popular such a plan is in Turkey, some have questioned whether that is simply an electoral ploy.)
“I think it’s going to be a bit more akin to France,” Tahiroglu said. “You know how France is so difficult to deal with, but at the end of the day you feel like we fundamentally share certain principles and values.”
Perhaps the most significant difference between the two candidates is how they will make decisions about foreign policy. Unlike his firebrand opponent, Kilicdaroglu has made a name for himself as a champion of liberal institutions.
The unassuming presidential candidate came to politics later in life after a 30-year career as a civil servant. He first entered parliament in 2002 before quickly rising through the ranks of the CHP. In 2010, he became the party leader, a position that he’s held ever since.
One of Kilicdaroglu’s key promises is to empower the ministry of foreign affairs, which has been sidelined as Erdogan has centralized power in the office of the presidency, according to Gonul Tol of the Middle East Institute.
“The opposition promises to re-institutionalize Turkey's foreign policymaking,” she told Responsible Statecraft. “I think that will bring a certain level of predictability.”
But reinvigorating Turkey’s foreign policy institutions will take time. During the past two decades, Erdogan has hired an army of like-minded, West-skeptic bureaucrats in key ministries. And Kilicdaroglu’s ambitious reform plans extend to many other institutions, raising questions about how much of his attention will be focused on foreign affairs.
“Turkey might be looking inwards, at least in the short term, and may not play that very active and at times aggressive role Erdogan has played on the foreign policy front,” Tol said.
Perhaps the largest question mark surrounds Russia. Erdogan has emphasized economic ties with Moscow going back to the early days of President Vladimir Putin’s time in power — no great surprise given the proximity of the two countries. The pair have grown closer in the years since, and Turkey has grown increasingly dependent on Russia for energy and tourism revenue.
In Erdogan’s telling, his later rapprochement with Moscow is a matter of cold security calculations. In 2015, the U.S. withdrew Patriot air defense systems from Turkey over Ankara’s objections just as Russia expanded its role in Syria. Erdogan read the move as a signal that the U.S. may not come to NATO ally Turkey’s defense in case of a clash with Russia.
Following the 2016 coup attempt in Ankara, Putin seized the opportunity to expand Turkish-Russian ties and offered to sell Turkey S-400 missile defense batteries. Erdogan accepted the offer, leading Washington to boot Ankara from the F-35 program and inflicting a wound in U.S.-Turkish relations that has yet to heal.
When Russia invaded Ukraine, Erdogan’s ties with Putin yielded some unexpected advantages for the West. Turkey has both provided crucial military aid to Kyiv and found ways to get the warring parties talking about issues of mutual concern. His most notable accomplishment came last summer, when Turkish mediation resulted in a deal to restart grain exports from Ukraine’s Black Sea ports.
But many Western analysts and NATO leaders remain skeptical of these upsides. As Tol noted, Erdogan has helped Russia dodge sanctions, which has “really frustrated Western allies.”
Kilicdaroglu said Saturday that he would put an end to that practice. His top foreign policy adviser recently said that the CHP leader would still be open to facilitating talks between Moscow and Kyiv, but he would “also remind Russia that Turkey is a member of NATO.”
What exactly that means remains unclear. “The opposition keeps saying that they will pursue a balanced Russia policy, which suggests that there's not going to be a dramatic change,” Tol argued.
At the same time, Kilicdaroglu pledged in his coalition’s platform to rejoin the F-35 program, suggesting that he may be willing to jettison the Russian S-400s — a move that would dramatically improve Turkey’s image among NATO allies. “The will is there to resolve the issue, which, again, will be welcomed by the West,” Tol said.
Kilicdaroglu could also start to heal relations with the West by following through on his promise to reduce the role of Turkey’s military in foreign affairs. Such a policy would likely lessen congressional opposition to selling F-16s to Turkey, which is rooted in concerns that the planes will be used to commit human rights violations.
Of course, all of this assumes that Kilicdaroglu can manage to hold together his “everyone-but-Erdogan” coalition after election day. As reporter Ragip Soylu recently wrote in Middle East Eye, however, the alliance is “held together by a president they all hate,” and one party even briefly broke with the coalition back in March.
And a more foreboding possibility looms: As Tahiroglu noted, no one is expecting the election to be “fair” in a liberal sense. Erdogan has pulled out all the stops in his campaign, even giving a 45 percent pay raise to public employees just four days before the vote.
But he has shown a willingness to take things further if his party’s power is threatened, as we witnessed when he forced a second vote in the 2019 Istanbul mayoral elections after the AKP candidate lost narrowly. (Ekrem Imamoglu, the CHP candidate, won the second tally in a landslide.)
If the AKP tries a similar move this time around, Washington’s response will “hugely shape” the future of U.S.-Turkish relations, according to Tahiroglu of POMED.
“People will note how the Biden administration, which talks a big talk about defending democracy, has or has not reacted,” she said.
