Erdogan victory a boost to Putin

It is no surprise that Vladimir Putin was among the first to congratulate Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan after the latter won a third five-year term in Sunday’s election. The outcome put an end to NATO hopes that the vote would elect a “more congenial, predictable and less troublesome” leader for a nation of 87 million people that is at the junction of East and West and among the alliance’s most strategically vital states. Instead Mr Erdogan, who boasted before the election about Turkey’s “special and growing relationship” with Russia, will remain in a position to thumb his nose at the West while helping Moscow’s ambitions in the Middle East and beyond.

With 99 per cent of the second-round vote counted, the Ankara autocrat had 52.16 per cent and his challenger, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, 47.84 per cent. Pre-election polls had suggested that Mr Kilicdaroglu, with a strongly pro-Western policy and a pledge to enhance Turkey’s commitment to NATO, could come out on top.

Many expected the electorate to punish Mr Erdogan for his perceived mishandling of February’s earthquake, which killed more than 50,000 people, inflation of 43 per cent (down from 85 per cent last year), a currency crisis, growing poverty, widespread corruption, and the further erosion of human rights and freedoms.

Mr Erdogan has spent years rigging the political system against his opponents. But anger over his authoritarian governance was not enough to enable Mr Kilicdaroglu to win. The West, unfortunately, faces a continuation of the leader of the NATO nation with the alliance’s second largest army perfidiously playing East and West off against each other. His most recent gambit was to block Sweden joining NATO, using the pretext of Stockholm giving asylum to Kurdish militants opposed to his regime. But the real reason may have been to help Mr Putin, who has fought hard against any expansion of NATO.

In 2017, Mr Erdogan outraged Western allies when he did a deal with Mr Putin for Russia’s S-400 surface-to-air missile system, which poses a major threat to NATO’s defences, including the F-35, America’s most expensive weapons system. More recently, Mr Erdogan has said he wants more Russian weaponry, while demanding that the US provide him with F-16 fighters in return for agreeing to Sweden’s NATO membership.

His election will dampen any hopes of an improvement to democracy and human rights in Turkey. But the country’s economic mess should give the West leverage. It must use it to persuade him that it is in Turkey’s best interests to be a wholehearted, fully committed member of NATO.