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What’s next for Turkey after local elections put Erdoğan on notice

Published in The Conversation: April 16, 2024, 11.03am EDT The recent municipal elections in Turkey represented a significant defeat for President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, signalling  a potential shift in Turkey’s political landscape . For more than two decades, Erdoğan has extended his  control over the Turkish media ,  the judiciary  and the  state bureaucracy , establishing an uneven playing field and skewed elections. This time, though, his Justice and Development Party — known as AKP — and its coalition with the ultra-right wing Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) lost 15 key municipalities. Mansur Yavas, Ankara’s mayor and CHP presidential hopeful, gestures to supporters in Ankara on March 31, 2024.   (AP Photo/Ali Unal) After  a disastrous and divisive presidential campaign  in 2023, the opposition, led by the secularist Republican People’s Party (CHP), assumed control of crucial municipal and provincial jurisdictions on March 31, 2024. The CHP, energized by fresh leadership and capab
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Nagorno-Karabakh: What’s next for the South Caucasus region following Azerbaijan’s aggression against Armenians?

  Spyros A. Sofos , Simon Fraser University Azerbaijani forces attacked the breakaway and long-disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in September 2023. Less than a month later, and the region is now all but deserted. The declared aim of the attack was to eliminate the last forces of the Armenian-majority self-styled republic. The lightning “anti-terror operation,” as Azerbaijan called it , precipitated the collapse of the breakaway republic. Most importantly — given that it came after a debilitating blockade that lasted for almost nine months — it instilled fear among the Karabakh Armenian population. Many fled their ancestral homeland. As an endless convoy of cars transporting desperate refugees filled the winding road to an uncertain future away from their homes, regional entities were lining up to influence the future shape of the South Caucasus region on the border of eastern Europe and west Asia. The conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia has been unfolding t
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Spyros Sofos: Bulgaria’s Blackmail is Unfair

  INTERVIEW     13.09.23 19 ПРЕГЛЕДИ                                         At a time when Macedonia is under strong international pressure concerning the constitutional changes, and the region is waiting to see whether it will be coupled to the European locomotive, external views become a dire need for the country to position itself on the right coordinates during the geopolitical developments that will not leave us unaffected. After the interview with the German journalist and specialist on the Balkans Michael Martens, we present to you another conversation, this time with  Spyros Sofos,  whose research at the London School of Economics and Political Science has focused, among other things, on social insecurity, identity and collective action, as well as populism in Southeast Europe. He says that Bulgarian elites playing the nationalist card poses the risk of adding fuel to the fire in the region at a time when North Macedonia's access to the EU would render the contentious issu
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Narrating the pandemic: COVID-19 as a feature of Turkey’s political landscape

by Spyros A. Sofos republished from  the Edge Hill University Institute for Social Responsibility website Recep Tayyip Erdoğan ’s 2018 presidential election victory appeared to seal his party’s domination over Turkey’s politics until the end of his term in 2023, or even 2028. Since this victory however, he has presided over an ailing economy. The Turkish lira has  plummeted , foreign reserves have shrunk as the Central bank intervened  to stabilise the currency , and external debt  mounted  until Qatar, in May 2020 gave the country’s economy  a temporary reprieve . Concurrently, a number of “rising stars” are waiting in the wings. These include the, 2019 İstanbul mayoral election winner,  Ekrem İmamoğlu , and former Erdoğan ally  Ali Babacan .  They are both preparing for the post-Erdoğan era by cultivating their charisma and political capital, causing concerns over Erdoğan’s re-election chances. Erdoğan sought to deflect attention from the country’s woes through a co
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The Turkish election as a warning against the irresistible charms of populism

Originally published in openDemocracy #RethinkingPopulism by Spyros A. Sofos RETHINKING POPULISM.; At a time when new political actors are mounting electoral and increasingly systemic challenges to contemporary democracies in the name of the people, there is little consensus in what the phenomenon is among academics, political activists and citizens alike. openDemocracy has been featuring articles on populist phenomena for some years (Mudde, Rovira Kaltwasser, Mouffe, Marlière, Pappas, Skodo, Sofos, Stavrakakis and Katsambekis, Gerbaudo, Gandesha, Tamás to name but a few) and has been successful in stimulating a recurring interest. But despite or perhaps because of the extensive and thought-provoking research on populism, the term has come to denote a range of widely diverse phenomena. Our aim is to bring together voices that don’t often interact, either because they belong to different fields of work, or as a result of geographical distance, to contribute to a vigorous and co
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