Read MEI’s weekly briefing featuring expert analysis of key regional developments for the week ahead.
Turkey’s loyalty to the Alliance is frequently questioned, including accusations of fence-sitting, especially when it comes to Russia. To ask, “Who lost Turkey?” is to misread the situation. Turkey is increasingly, albeit carefully, moving away from the Kremlin.
Read MEI’s weekly briefing featuring expert analysis of key regional developments for the week ahead.
At the Washington Summit, NATO member states mostly focused on efforts to counter Russia and to support Ukraine. However, the 2024 summit communiqué also addresses non-Euro-Atlantic risks and opportunities, based on the idea that “conflict, fragility and instability” elsewhere directly affects NATO security.
For Egyptian officials, June should have been a month to celebrate. And yet none of the seeming macroeconomic successes that the government recorded brought much reassurance to the average Egyptian, who has continued to experience currency shortages, an unreliable energy grid, and fears of a resurgent spike in inflation.
Despite their popular nature, the protests in northwestern Syria, sparked by racist attacks on Syrians over the border in Turkey, have exposed the rifts and divisions between various opposition factions. Bilal Samir explores the positions of the major military groups in Turkish-controlled areas and assesses how closely they align with Turkey’s policy.
After two decades in power and following the Justice and Development Party’s historic defeat in the 2024 local elections, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is now at his most vulnerable. What comes next is not only important for the future prospects of Turkish democracy but also holds important lessons for autocrats across the world. Scholars Evren Balta, Seda Demiralp, Edgar Şar, and M. Murat Kubilay seek to answer key questions about the country’s political, economic, and foreign policy trajectory in a new report from the Middle East Institute.
For years under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey pursued an unconventional monetary policy. The situation, long untenable, finally became unsustainable in the run-up to the presidential and parliamentary elections in May 2023. In the immediate aftermath of the vote, President Erdoğan announced a dramatic shift, returning to orthodox monetary policy. While there have been tangible improvements on a number of fronts as a result, the country faces both declining household purchasing power in the short term and a range of broader economic challenges in the longer run.
Similar to the normalization trends in domestic politics, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government has bolstered normalization in foreign policy, aiming for integration into regional and international blocs. The domestic economic and political crises further underscored this trend, and the results of the March 2024 local elections demonstrated to the government that its polarizing discourse no longer resonates either inside or outside the country. This article analyzes the changing domestic political dynamics of foreign policy, Turkey’s role in the Western alliance with a specific emphasis on the Ukrainian War, and the Middle East normalization process in light of the Gaza conflict.
If the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM) were to take a more active role in efforts to peacefully resolve the Kurdish issue in Turkey, it could potentially help to break the current impasse. What this role might entail and whether the party is capable of playing it effectively are key questions. This piece will explore these issues by examining the experience of its predecessor, the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), over the past decade, as well as the debates following the May 2023 general elections and March 2024 local elections.
While the 2023 elections caused widespread disappointment among op-position voters and an acute rise in political apathy, the 2024 elections once again restored hopes for Turkish democratization. About a month after the local elections, President Erdoğan held a private meeting with CHP leader Özgür Özel at the AKP headquarters. The meeting ended with both leaders announcing the beginning of a new period in Turkish politics, which Erdoğan described as a “softening” and Özel as a “normalization.”
With NATO celebrating 75 years since its founding, Alliance members will gather in Washington, DC, on July 9-11, for a historic summit. Two of the key issues on the agenda will be addressing the acute threats emanating from the Black Sea region and adopting a strategic approach toward the Middle East and Africa.
On June 29, at an aid and investment conference in Cairo, Egypt and the EU reached a €1 billion investment deal, and over 20 MoUs, collectively worth approximately €40 billion in private investment, were signed on the sidelines. Little mention has been made of migration in the new European agreement with Egypt, but there is little doubt that it is a pivotal factor.
In its 2022 Strategic Concept, NATO declared the Black Sea Region (BSR) of strategic importance for the Alliance, yet this recognition has never translated into NATO developing a proper strategy toward its critical southeastern flank. That glaring gap must be addressed right away.
While the Washington Summit is unlikely to deliver any ground-breaking outcome, it certainly offers the opportunity to articulate the nexus between security in Europe and the Mediterranean-African region. NATO also has the opportunity to renew and streamline its partnerships with Middle Eastern and North African countries while strengthening its outreach to Africa.