In the Ukraine war, Turkish President Erdoğan is trying again to mediate. Even if domestic political motives play a decisive role for him, his mission is not entirely fruitless. Who trusts him?
For years, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has ruled almost like an old-style monarch. The man, who has been nicknamed the “Koran nightingale” since his early youth, uses a repressive system of police and military force to suppress the country’s democratic institutions and opposition. In the meantime, however, a catastrophic economic development has overshadowed the delicate political situation. To make matters worse, new elections are coming up and Erdoğan’s poll numbers are like the economic development: lousy.
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From a Turkish perspective, this forms the background when Erdoğan arrives in Lviv, Ukraine, this Thursday afternoon, where he will be received by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The two wanted to talk about the possibilities of peace, and UN Secretary-General António Guterres is to join them later.
How credible is Erdoğan as a mediator? And what is the point of peace talks if one of the warring parties, the Russians, isn’t even there?
At least those who can still talk to each other get together, says Thomas Jäger, a political scientist and Turkey expert. There are enough topics among the three: grain deliveries across the Black Sea, the situation in the Russian-occupied Zaporizhia nuclear power plant.
Erdoğan’s political weight in the Ukraine war has grown. One of Erdoğan’s successes is that grain from Ukraine is once again being shipped through the Black Sea. He has now met twice with the Russian ruler Vladimir Putin during the course of the war. It is not known whether he brought anything from these meetings that is now helping in Lviv.
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It probably isn’t. Neither Ukraine nor Russia is really anxious to make peace in the current phase of the war, in which both are wearing each other down but neither can gain a decisive advantage. Erdoğan won’t do much to change that, even if he ends up being the least committed to one position.
“He’s open to all sides,” says Jäger. “He condemns aggressive war but does not endorse sanctions against Russia. He cooperates with Russia on energy issues and stands on the other side in Syria against the Assad regime, which in turn is supported by Russia.”
Erdoğan could use a win badly. It’s not like that for him. While Germany moans about an inflation rate that will soon be in double digits, Ankara is struggling with completely different values: In July, consumer prices rose by 79.6 percent compared to the same month last year, as the national statistics office announced last week.
Ali Babacan, the former Foreign and Economics Minister, who broke away from Erdoğan in 2019 and founded his own party, formulated the situation dramatically at the beginning of this year: His country is “in the middle of the worst crisis in our recent history”. As early as 2019, Paul Krugman, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, warned that the Turkish economy was falling into a “death spiral”. The economist considers it irresponsible that the domestic central bank fell under the thumb of the president’s political decisions and lost all independence.
The inflation of the consumptive lira shows its consequences. Anyone who still has money exchanges it for foreign currency. Normal shopping in the supermarket has now become a luxury, and prices are being raised almost daily. Some foods such as meat or oil are now considered symbols of prosperity. Shops have rationed basic groceries and pharmacies are short of essential medicines. The queues in front of the kiosks in Istanbul, where the city government sells the subsidized “Halk Ekmek”, the people’s bread, are getting longer and longer.
Due to the existential need, the criticism of the authoritarian style of power is growing. In recent polls, Erdoğan’s AKP is behind the largest opposition party, the CHP, for the first time in 18 years with just 24 percent of the vote. The number of supporters would have halved. His personal poll numbers are also plummeting. After all, 84 percent of Turks blame him for the economic crisis. 72 percent currently do not believe that the current government can solve the crisis. The presidential system introduced by Erdoğan is also increasingly coming under criticism.
In this phase, he needs a success in order to regain domestic political ground. With the beginning of the war, however, the Turkish government faced a dilemma. To side with Ukraine wholeheartedly would have meant severing economic ties with Russia, which would have compounded the disaster at home.
On the other hand, a break with NATO was not an option either. The role of mediator arose from this need. So far, he has been accepted by both sides, and it helps that he also marked a turning point in Turkish politics in the Middle East when he agreed to resume full diplomatic relations with Israel.
The bottom line is that he could do what no one thought possible: win back his reputation internationally to such an extent that he is also seen as the best choice for the head of government in his own country.
The article “In the end, Erdoğan can achieve what nobody thought possible” comes from WirtschaftsKurier.
