How the West should prepare for the Turkish elections 

Despite being a NATO member, Turkey has stayed neutral in the war in Ukraine and continues to block Sweden’s accession to the alliance. Yet, Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is better known domestically for his economic mismanagement and shoddy response to the earthquake that killed 60,000 people in February than his government’s increasingly aggressive international strategy. Presidential and parliamentary elections on 14 May could even raise the prospect of a Turkey without Erdogan. 

In this episode, Mark Leonard welcomes ECFR’s research director Jeremy Shapiro and associate senior policy fellow Asli Aydintasbas who have just published a commentary on how the West should prepare for the Turkish elections. Can the opposition unity candidate Kemal Kilicdaroglu pull off a victory? What would a post-Erdogan EU-Turkey relationship look like? And could Turkey’s EU accession negotiations restart? 

This podcast was recorded on 27 April 2023.  

Bookshelf: 

• The Keys to Democracy: Sortition as a New Model for Citizen Power by Maurice Pope 
• Memoirs, 1925-1950 by George F. Kennan
• The Diplomat – A Netflix Series