Congratulations, Türkiye! Which Is The Real Middle Eastern Democracy, Anyway?
The Turkish elections, NATO and the future of the Middle East
Careful readers of Thoughts and Adventures will note my general Turkophilia and boy am I excited by the results of the municipal elections yesterday and what they might portend for the greater Middle East and NATO.
For Americans the A.K.P. is the Republican Party. It pretends to believe in a Moral Majority but really it’s become a racket for the construction trades and a front for some of the drug trade.
There’ll be lost of splicing and dicing about what the results mean.
Those in the know know I invest in Turkish startups. I have Turkish friends, some of whom I consider like family. I’m learning Turkish.
It seems as if America itself is catching up on the Turkish industrial project. In recent days DuPont and Menatek Defense partnered on ball bearings. The Wall Street Journal profiled Bayraktar. Bloomberg covered the deals with the Turkish arms industry.
We’re often told that we have to support Israel because it’s the only democracy in the Middle East.
But with his polite and humble concession speech tonight Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan showed that he isn’t the autocrat that the pro-Israel lobby pretended he was.
“We will obey the will of the people as we have done in the past. The people said their last words. We will work with the mayors who won the elections. We will self-critique ourselves. We had setbacks.”
His last move will be to extract concessions from Prime Minister Mark Rutte over the new NATO chief. “The alliance must take into account sensitivities of non-EU allies,” Erdogan says. We’ll see what that means in practice.