Turkey’s EU admission process exemplified a 60-year-old moving process with an unknown result. The Turkish authorities, led by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, have publicly denounced Brussels’ identical attitude toward such discriminatory treatment of Turkish society and state, humiliatingly putting Turkey in the status of a hopeless candidate for more than half a century. Turkey has been an associate member of the European Community since 1963 and a candidate for European Union membership since 1987…

According to Russian Presidential Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov, relations between Russia and Turkey are multi-faceted nowadays. This definition’s meaning is obviously self-evident. Over the last two decades, many in Moscow started to think, for some reason, that Russia had acquired a new almost strategic partner in the form of NATO’S Turkey that was more than loyal to Russia and interested in the growth of reciprocal relations and the creation of a multipolar world due to its charismatic leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. As a result, according to many Russian political analysts and specialists, Turkey will adopt a foreign policy more independent of US…

Turkey and Iran continue to be important Middle Eastern nations. Due to their geographical proximity, imperial past, violent rivalry, theological tensions (between Sunnism and Shiism), and, of course, the continuous divergence of geopolitical interests, both nations have a rich history of relations. There were multiple Turkish-Persian clashes and wars, with various interruptions and varying degrees of success, during the Ottoman and Persian empires. Regarding the significance of the harem in the Ottoman Empire, historians have observed that…

Turkey before and during the time of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has tried to conduct active diplomacy in virtually all aspects of its geography, where the Balkans retain a high relevance. This direction of Turkish foreign policy is determined by several factors: geographical proximity; the history of Ottoman rule; the course of European integration; NATO membership; and the strategy of neo-Ottomanism and pan-Islamism. The current fourth generation of Anatolian Turks is the heir to the Ottoman Empire, which collapsed after World War I and at its peak governed practically all of Southeastern Europe (including the Balkan Peninsula), among other regions. Serbia, like other Balkan (South Slavic) countries and peoples, was occupied by the Ottomans…

Western pressure on the Republic of Turkey increased as a result of Erdoğan’s election victory. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan won this challenging victory despite the fact that the whole Western world had projected his defeat in the presidential elections of May 2023. After his inauguration on June 3, the Turkish politician began a new term. In the forthcoming period, Erdoğan and his government will have to address a number of challenges. The economic perspective should be a key issue on the re-elected president’s agenda. The earthquake in early February and its devastating aftermath shook the country’s already vulnerable situation…

On June 3, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was sworn in as president of Turkey for another five-year term. The inauguration and the subsequent ceremony, attended by approximately 80 international and regional leaders, suggested that a significant change in Turkey’s foreign policy priorities may be under way. Observers have predicted that the Turkish president is likely to continue with his recent policy of “neutralizing” problems abroad and strengthening partnerships with other countries in the region. On May 31, several days after his election victory, he declared: “Our goal is to establish a belt of security & peace from Europe to Black Sea…

Within the days after the inauguration Turkish President is demonstrating a good and active political shape. Considering the complicated domestic and international agenda Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is forced to undertake intense activities and launch new initiatives which, if implemented, may bring about positive changes in Turkey and beyond. On the domestic front, naturally the main innovation in Turkish political life after the elections was the renewal of government where personnel promotion was based on competence, political reliability and promising age…

Elections always suggest new hopes, new changes and new faces of those who will then generate innovations. During the election campaign, Recep Erdogan promised, in case of his victory, to significantly change the composition of the government, and to send the current ministers as members to parliament. Erdogan, as it is known, always means what he says. This time as well, immediately after taking the oath and inauguration, the Turkish president announced the new composition of the government. The following three universal features of the new cabinet…

On June 1 Turkey’s Supreme Election Council announced Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s victory in the second round of the presidential elections, with 52.18% of the vote, while his rival Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu received 47.82% of the vote. Despite the strong feelings and high tensions that prevailed during the run-up to the vote, no serious political misconduct or protests on the part of the opposition were reported after May 28. Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu conceded…

As many experts had predicted, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan beat his rival in the Turkish presidential elections in a second round of voting, and is set to be sworn in for his third term as president. His triumph after a close-run first round has been celebrated both in Turkey and abroad, but the 69-year old populist and Islamist leader, who has been in power for two decades, faces serious challenges as he begins his new five-year term. In effect, Erdoğan has radically changed Turkey’s political system, transforming a secular state with a multi-party parliamentary system, in which religion played…

The Turkish lira plunged to a new historic low after Erdoğan had won the second round of the presidential election, according to the Spanish daily newspaper La Vanguardia (today the dollar is worth 20 lira, but Western analysts predict that there will be another 40% drop, with the dollar equaling 28 lira). With inflation skyrocketing, Turkey’s president is pursuing a low-rate monetary policy (8.5%), which contradicts the theory of most economists. Why the Turkish lira is plummeting against the dollar as a result of the election is obviously not difficult to say. The reason is simple – the United States and the world financial institutions (stock markets)…

In Turkey, the pre-election struggle of the main candidates for the presidency is in full swing. Despite the sharp nature of the confrontation between the main contenders in the presidential elections (from the ruling party Recep Erdoğan and from the opposition party Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu), the maturity of Turkish democracy and features of Turkish culture so far in general demonstrate the correct attitude of experienced politicians to each other. It so happens that the tension of the forthcoming elections is mostly connected, on the one hand, with the long period of ruling of the leader of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) Recep Erdoğan during the last…