2023 in review, 2024 ahead

My annual politics review and predictions

My apologies, o dearly beloved, for I have been absent. I’ve been working on a longer piece on online culture and journalism, but wasn’t quite able to finish it ahead of the holidays. I’ll keep it in the digital drawer and get back to it in January. I think you’ll find it interesting.

That being said, the end of the year is upon us, and I’d like to take the opportunity to take stock and look ahead. Now, there are two strands of writing on Kültürkampf: there’s the political culture strand, and there’s the political analysis strand. Today I’ll focus on the latter, and there’ll be a separate post on the former.

As always, feel free to email me, engage in discussion in the comments, or if you’re an active Substack user, head over to the Kültürkampf chat.

Nasrettin Hoca: “Son of a bit*h!..”

Looking back over 2023

As usual, I went back to look at what I wrote last year. Here’s what I submitted to the annual roundup at

Turkey recap

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The problem this year is that the opposition is too divided to win the election, but the government is too reviled to continue governing without major problems.

I think we're likely to see Erdoğan winning the presidency. This will cause great public unrest, making his supporters more aggressive. If the opposition wins a parliamentary majority, it might cool tensions a bit, and the nationalists in the opposition could be given some perfunctory roles in the legislative process. The country would be more divided, especially between the big cities and everywhere else.

In foreign policy, Turkey will continue to expand its regional influence and its relations with the US and Europe will probably get considerably worse, possibly reaching a breaking point.

Let’s go through it bit by bit.

First, the election. As I wrote before, my long-range prediction proved to be right. Erdoğan won the election. I thought that this would happen because nationalistic concerns would trump economic concerns. That seems to have been the government’s intent, which is why they held a nationalistic, even militaristic campaign. What I didn’t understand at the time, and what could have made my prediction more firm, was the economics of the government’s strategy. The economic pain wasn’t as acute as it appeared, and it wasn’t as widely spread as many said it was.

Second, the opposition’s stance. I predicted that defeat could make opposition supporters more aggressive, by which I meant that they might be more eager to protest. The opposite has happened.

There was a flash of anger in the wake of the earthquake in February, and it did feed into the election campaign, but the opposition lost, so the anger dissipated into apathy. I think this was because there wasn’t a major dispute about the validity of the election results. Erdoğan won both presidental and parliamentary elections by a significant margin. The opposition built up a lot of hope, thought that they could win, then failed spectacularly. As a result, opposition supporters have been withdrawing from politics.

Third, foreign policy. I didn’t know where exactly, but I predicted that Turkish influence would continue to spread across the map. And it has. The offensive in Nagorno-Karabakh, though Azerbaijani in execution, is also Turkey’s expansion. It unlocked new land routes to the East, and softened Armenia’s approach towards Ankara. Turkish pressure on Rojava has also increased, especially through bombing campaigns.

I also predicted that relations with the US would get worse, which they have. You’d think that that was pretty self-explanatory. They’ve been getting worse for at least a decade. It’s a feature (or the feature), not a bug of the new regime. Still, there are always people expecting that to change. I wrote an article about that over the summer.

What didn’t happen was a “breaking point” in relations with the US. I do think that this is inevitable. Turkey’s new regime cannot remain a treaty ally of the United States for very long, and it can’t be an accession country to the EU. The political basis for those things no longer exists. The problem is that legal architecture like that is very slow to catch up with political reality. It will eventually happen, and in a more orderly world, people would plan the adjustment, but I have a feeling it’s going to be a bit more abrupt. My mistake was in thinking that the break could plausibly be around the corner.

Looking towards 2024

What do we have to look forward to? I’ll reflect on some of the broader trends here.

I think it’s going to be a relatively calm year. The regime has scored a huge victory in 2023, and looks stronger than ever before. The opposition has been routed, its elites are fighting each other, its grassroots have lost hope.

İYİ’s future will be crucial in shaping the political landscape. The party could separate entirely from the opposition and cozy up to the regime, but I don’t think it can take all of its voter base with it. The elite are gradually leaning into that transition, partly because they’d benefit directly from it. Voters are a different story. It’ll be slower for them, so it’s probably going to happen after the municipal elections on March 31.

The candidates of the Erdoğan palace are set to do very well in the elections, taking back many of the major cities they lost in 2019. The AK Party rarely makes the same mistake twice. They’re probably already working swing neighborhoods door by door. If the CHP-İYİ split persists, and İYİ puts up serious candidates in the big cities, then the AK Party will probably win them all.

Istanbul is kind of separate from all the other races. If CHP mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu is able to make a deal with İYİ, I think that race is still his to lose. Some of the newer things that upset voters, like immigration and housing prices are just too acute in Istanbul for the AK Party to make a comeback. If he loses that election, İmamoğlu will probably try to take leadership of the CHP, which could be very difficult.

In terms of foreign policy, I think it’s going to be relatively calm. Turkey’s overarching goal on this front is to increase its geopolitical footprint. Erdoğan seems to believe that this would be easier to do if Donald Trump gets elected for a second term. I think that makes a lot of sense. The Washington status quo instinctively wants to stop geopolitical revisionism, be it from adversaries like Russia or nominal allies like Turkey. Not only does Trump lack that instinct, he relishes fighting it in Washington and elsewhere. That’s why it would make sense for Erdoğan to keep his powder dry until November 5, then act deliberately. I think a lot of revisionist leaders, including Putin, are doing the same. They believe that time is on their side.

Overall, the country is starting to see Erdoğan as less divisive a figure. If he is able to pull İYİ towards him, win the municipal elections, play it cool in foreign policy, and have reasonable success with his economic orthodoxy, he will have the loyalty and support of a stable majority. He will then become a father-of-the-nation type of figure, easing into a stretch of four years without elections. The question of succession, of course, would remain open.