“THAT Tayyip Erdogan he had one obsession: to become equal to the greatest sultans, Muhammad the Conqueror and Suleiman the Magnificent … However, he is threatened with ostracism through ballot box like a simple Iznogoud. With these words, the French Le Figaro described the “twilight of the Sultan” in its article about today’s elections in Turkey. For the first time since coming to power in 2002, a strongman from a neighboring country appears as an outsider.

The most influential international publications (The Economist, Le Monde, Washington Post, etc.) supported the opposition candidate Kemal Kilicdaroglu, estimating that the defeat of Erdogan will be a signal to authoritarian leaders such as Orban and Modi around the world and, above all, will bring Turkey closer west. US Ambassador to Turkey Jeff Flake visited Kilicdaroglu during the height of the election season, and German Agriculture Minister Cem Etzdemir openly wished the opposition a victory.

Adding to those expectations, the 74-year-old Kemalist politician denounced Russia’s meddling in the election campaign, implying that Moscow was behind the leaked sex video that forced Muharrem Ince to pull out of the fifth round of the election. A strange statement, given that all Western media believed that the departure of Ins, also a Kemalist, increased Kılıçdaroğlu’s chances of being elected in the first round.

There is always, of course, the fear of testing the old aphorism that says that it is important not only who votes for what, but also who counts the votes. The opposition recalls that in 2014, a “sudden” power outage interrupted the counting of votes in 35 cities – the then energy minister attributed the incident to a cat that climbed into a voltage transformer. In addition, the state of emergency declared in the aftermath of the February 6 earthquakes in 11 of the country’s 81 geographic regions raised questions about the compilation of voter lists.

The fact is that for two decades, Erdogan won the election campaign without widespread falsifications. When he lost his parliamentary majority in June 2015, he accepted the result and managed to overturn it in new elections in November. In 2019, the ruling AKP attempted to nullify Ekrem Imamoglu’s victory in the Istanbul municipal elections, but resigned himself to his landslide victory in the second round of elections. However, given the extreme polarization and the fact that both camps seem absolutely convinced of their victory, there is a widespread fear of contested results and unrest. Interior Minister Suleiman Soylu’s warning that the West would attempt a “political coup” apparently did nothing to allay those fears.

Today’s elections will mark a historic milestone after the upheavals of 2002 that destroyed the old political system and brought the AKP to power.

In any case, today’s elections will be a turning point in Turkey’s political history, another halt after the upheaval of 2002, when the old political system was overthrown and the AKP came to power. The first decade of Tayyip Erdogan was the best period of the Republic of Turkey since the coup of Kenan Evren in 1980 (by the way, and the most peaceful period in Greek-Turkish relations since Attila). The AKP emerged as an “Islamic-Democratic”, European Christian Democrat-aligned, socially conservative but politically liberal democratization force that restricted army parades to barracks with the strategic goal of Turkey’s integration into the EU.

However, around 2012, Erdogan’s system undergoes a malignant transformation from “Islamic democracy” to Islamic nationalism, which later crystallizes in the new AKP ruling coalition with far-right MHP Devlet Bahceli (“Grey Wolves”). Two events played a catalytic role. First, Erdogan realized that the dominant powers of the EU, they do not want the full integration of their country. Recently, documents from the Foreign Office were published in the German magazine Der Spiegel, from which it follows that since 1992, then-Chancellor Helmut Kohl has privately stated that Turkey will never become a member of the Union.

At the same time, the so-called “Arab Spring” is flaring up, prompting Erdogan to seek a hegemonic role in the Sunni world in cooperation with the Muslim Brotherhood, a neo-Ottoman replacement for the lost European dream. The consequence of this mutation was a drift towards authoritarianism, which peaked after the failed 2016 coup. Significantly, the two protagonists of Erdogan’s first decade, the architect of his foreign policy, Ahmet Davutoglu and the czar of the economy, Ali Babacan, today lead the two parties of the opposition coalition.

Tayyip Erdogan came to power after the devastating earthquake of 1999 and the devastating financial crisis of 2001. For the same reasons, the earthquake and the new financial crisis, he is in danger of leaving today. However, even the opposition did not provide a convincing answer to Turkey’s acute problems. Even if she manages to come to power after a relatively smooth transition (huge IF), everyone knows that the six parties that support her (Kemalists, far-right nationalists, Islamists) disagree on almost everything except the need to ostracize Erdogan. Moreover, public opinion polls show that the opposition is lagging behind the ruling coalition in the parliamentary elections. Finally, the new government will have to take highly unpopular measures to stabilize the economy, which could quickly undermine it.

Given these facts, Turkey, with or without Erdogan at the helm, is very likely to enter a period of intense political instability and social tension. The problem for the West is that its leverage over the Turkish state has been greatly weakened. The EU has nothing to offer Ankara other than a customs union and the abolition of visas – enough, perhaps, to continue the partnership on immigration, but nothing more. And the US is probably not going to give up investments in the Kurds, who provide them with footholds in Syria, Iraq and their oil. Therefore, relations between the West and Turkey are likely to remain adventurous and unpredictable.