Sultan Erdogan’s Turkey Should Be Tossed From NATO (The American Conservative)

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Sultan Erdogan’s Turkey Should Be Tossed From NATO
By Doug Bandow • April 4, 2019

ISTANBUL – A couple weeks ago I visited Turkey’s largest city, cosmopolitan Istanbul. Pictures of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan promoting his party’s candidate for mayor, former prime minister Binali Yildirim, dominated the cityscape and vastly outnumbered those for Ekrem Imamoglu, the opposition Republican People’s Party’s standard-bearer. Few observers thought the latter had much of a chance. Yet after the polls closed on Sunday, Imamoglu had narrowly triumphed.

Assuming the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) does not steal the election—it’s contesting the result and controls most levers of power—the opposition will have won mayoralties in five of the country’s six most populous cities, including the capital of Ankara. The AKP and related parties have ruled Istanbul and Ankara since 1994, making the losses doubly painful. The opposition also made significant gains at the provincial level. The AKP still picked up a plurality of votes and along with its nationalist coalition partner secured a bare national majority of 51.6 percent. However, Erdogan, seemingly on his way to being a modern sultan, no longer seems invincible.

His greatest weakness today was once his strongest advantage: the economy. Turkey has fallen into a recession; per capita GDP has dropped to the level of a dozen years ago. Unemployment has surged to the highest level in nine years. Inflation hit 20 percent, while last year the Turkish lira’s value fell 28 percent.

Read more at: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/sultan-erdogans-turkey-should-be-tossed-from-nato/