Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will remain in office until 2028, unless his health holds up and he tries to give himself another term with a fancy constitutional amendment. That said, his political position has perhaps never been more precarious since surviving the 2016 coup attempt. But Erdogan’s domestic weakness is unlikely to lead to a “softening” of his policies. On the contrary, the major political defeat suffered by his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) in the March municipal elections is likely to lead him, at least in the short term, to strengthen his attempts to consolidate power at home and to take a tougher stance abroad.
There are at least four reasons why the AKP appears to have lost its luster. First, there is the Turkish economy. President Erdogan has long been fixated on offering low interest rates and dwindling foreign reserves as a means to float the lira. But since 2023, after a brief turmoil in that year’s general election that forced a runoff, the president has reluctantly allowed Turkey’s economic policy to “normalize.” While the result appears to have been some improvement, the reformist team can do little to combat the corruption that is systematically linked to Erdogan’s clientelistic regime. Moreover, inflation has proven extremely difficult to control, causing shocking hardship for many Turkish households.
Second, Erdogan’s eagerness to centralize power has prevented the ruling party from training and fielding qualified candidates in municipal elections, such as the AKP candidate for Istanbul mayor Murat Kurm, who was a total lack of talent as a retail politician and briefly became a hot topic online after making a campaign gaffe.
