2024 in review, 2025 ahead

Thinking about Turkish politics

It’s that time of year again. Over at

Turkey recap

, they’re gathering predictions about the year ahead, so I’m trying to come up with something.

Regular readers know that I like to take big swings with this thing. I don’t just say “X might happen, but Y might also happen,” I actually force myself to take some risks. This means that I’m going to be wrong, so every year, I also take apart my last year’s prediction, see where I went wrong, and why.

“Know thyself” and all that.

Note also, that all this is about Turkish politics. One thing I’m going to try and do this year is to broaden my subject a little bit and write about subjects beyond Turkey.

Having said that, let’s get started.

---

---

Last year’s predictions

Here is my prediction from the Turkey recap newsletter in January:

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. Overall, the country is starting to see Erdoğan as a less divisive figure. If he is able to pull İYİ Party 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, perhaps even slightly growing majority.

On foreign policy, I think we’ll see more of the gentle approach that’s been present since the elections. Ankara’s overarching goal is to revise the international treaties that determine its place in the world. They seem to believe that this would be easier to do if Donald Trump gets elected for a second term. That makes 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 Nov. 5. The nature of his task will change considerably depending on who’s in the White House in 2025.

There’s also a slightly longer version from my post in December, but the core is the same.

Obviously that first point was totally off. The opposition won big in the regional elections. I think that was a blind spot for me because I wasn’t attuned to the economic story as much. It being a regional election, the stakes also weren’t very high, and a part of the Erdoğan electorate thought that they could punish the government a bit by voting for the other side — whoever that might be. It also turned out that the split in the opposition (especially CHP-IYI) didn’t matter. People voted straight for the most popular candidates, which was CHP in the West, and DEM in the East.

So I was wrong about the election outcome, but I still think I was right about the Erdoğan government’s lasting political appeal. They are still immensely popular. Their government isn’t experiencing a legitimacy crisis. In fact they were so confident that they tried a high-risk strategy, and they could, because it was a low-stakes election. It didn’t work out the way they wanted it to, but I don’t think that’s a big problem for them anyways. It appears that the municipalities aren’t as important to them as they once were. They appear pretty confident that the CHP isn’t going to be able to use those cities to unify their party (and the opposition) and mount a major national campaign anytime soon.

Top: I’m packing weights to avoid going too high. Bottom: I marvel at your optimism. (by Selçuk Erdem)

I think I was right on foreign policy, but that was fairly clear anyways. They played it very cool, but worked hard behind the scenes. There were a few rhetorical peaks on the Gaza front, but that’s it. They caved to pressure and introduced some half-hearted economic restrictions on trade with Israel, but the most critical items, such fuel, continues to flow to Israel through Turkish channels. Again, that’s not because they don’t want to move against Israel, it’s just that they’re realistic about the pace at which to do that.

Also, here’s Erdoğan delivering a very data-driven look back on what he has accomplished in 2024.

My predictions for 2025

Without an election on the horizon, it’s a bit difficult to choose events to predict. Turkey is a country that’s going through very rapid and fundamental change. The country is becoming demographically more diverse, economically more unequal, and culturally more vibrant.

In terms of politics, I could lay out what I don’t think is going to happen.

I don’t think we’ll see early elections this year, nor do I think that there’s going to be a “peace process” that’s defined by some kind of negotiation between Ankara and the PKK (or whoever represents the Kurdish movement). Ankara might extend some symbolic rights to Kurds, but that’s going to have more to do with its grand strategy across the border than any negotiations.

I don’t think there’ll be early elections. There’s still a lot of economic work done for that to be viable. Nor do I think there’ll be a referendum. I also don’t see any indication that the opposition is going to firm up and become a more formidable force this year. If anything, the government is likely to continue chipping away at their powers and degrading their ability to unite.

The big movements will probably be on foreign policy. I think 2025 is going to be a year when Turkey becomes a much bigger regional player to its north and south.

In the south, Syria has flipped from the “Shia crescent” to a populist Sunni regime. This is one of the major events in the region’s history, and 2025 will be the year when we see a new pattern settling around this fact. Turkey is pushing hard for Rojava to be disbanded, with the American presence there being the only obstacle. I’ll go out on a limb and say that this is more likely to happen than not.

To the north, Turkey is looking for some kind of a strategic advantage in Ukraine. Erdoğan is hinting that his team is hard at work on that file, and I don’t doubt it. I think that when the Americans and Russians sit down and hammer out a deal, it’s going to be with some form of Turkish mediation, which will mean that Turkey will be part of whatever comes next for Ukraine.

I think US-Turkey relations are going to be fairly calm in the short run, but inevitably tense in the longer run. With Assad gone, Turkish power is radiating south, and will inevitably conflict with Israel. There are only so many “win-win” deals that are possible before Ankara and Washington hit upon some irreconcilable differences here. Will that happen in 2025? Maybe not, but we’ll start seeing what it might look like.