MUST-READS

• Turkey Election: Erdogan Faces Kilicdaroglu in High-Stakes Vote for the World

  For the world’s money managers, the election outcome could determine whether Turkey becomes a “buy” again. Investors plowed cash into the country during the boom times of the early Erdogan years. More recently, they’ve been heading for the exit as he and his loyal circle of technocrats defied economic orthodoxy by cutting interest rates while everyone else was raising them to cool inflation.

• Turkey’s election gives Greece a migraine

  After Turks themselves, Greeks will be the closest observers of Sunday’s Turkish election and they have few illusions that everything is going to be rosy with the old foe (but fellow NATO member) across the Aegean Sea after the vote, no matter who wins. That’s not to say Greeks wouldn’t be happy to see the back of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has proved a bête noire. Erdoğan has not only engaged Greek jet fighters in dangerous brinkmanship over the Aegean Sea but has hinted he could snatch a Greek island overnight and even threatened Athens with a missile. His decision in 2020 to reconvert Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia — once Greek-speaking Constantinople’s greatest church — from a museum back into a mosque, as it had been in Ottoman times, delivered a particularly grave cultural wound to Greeks.

• Turkey elections: The battle for five million first-time voters

  According to Ozer Sencar, the director of MetroPoll, a Turkish polling organisation, 78 percent of voters in the 18-24 age group have expressed their intention to vote, a rate lower than the general population, at above 80 percent. “In our April polling results, half of young voters prefer Kilicdaroglu,” Sencar told Middle East Eye. “Kilicdaroglu is by far the most preferred candidate amongst voters in the 18-24 age group. Erdogan can get around 30 percent of the vote in this age group.”

  • Reuters - What's at stake in Turkey's landmark elections?
• Moscow hosts more Turkey-Syria rapprochement talks

  Russia's defense minister hosted his counterparts from Iran, Syria and Turkey on Tuesday for talks that were part of the Kremlin's efforts to help broker a rapprochement between the Turkish and Syrian governments.

• Turkey Presidential Elections 2023: Would Erdogan Peacefully Concede to Kilicdaroglu?

  Turkey holds presidential and parliamentary elections on May 14. They could unseat President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP), who have governed for the past 20 years. In that time, Erdogan and the AKP have left a deep mark on the country—expanding the role of Islam in the traditionally secular state and growing Turkey’s influence abroad. But years of unorthodox economic policy and a deadly February earthquake have undermined confidence in the government, leading many voters to question the reputation for competent administration that has traditionally been central to the AKP’s appeal.

• Long-Running Turkey-Iraq Oil Dispute Continues to Simmer, Despite Court Decision

  As Turkey approaches pivotal elections, the International Chamber of Commerce’s Court of Arbitration in Paris has ruled against it in a long-running dispute with Iraq regarding crude oil exports from Iraq’s semiautonomous Kurdistan region. After losing the case, Turkey was ordered to pay Iraq around $1.5 billion for limited aspects of breach of contract from 2014-18. The ruling, which was made public March 25, three days after Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed al-Sudani visited Ankara, will likely lead to some shifting in the Ankara-Erbil-Baghdad relationship as the parties seek to turn the page on energy issues.

• Turkey elections: All you need to know about the opposition’s foreign policy

  For the first time in 22 years, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the bete noire of the West who is often labelled abroad as an autocrat, could lose power. Opinion polls consistently predict a victory for the opposition’s joint presidential candidate Kemal Kilicdaroglu in the second round of elections, scheduled for May, if no one gets over 50 percent the first time round. This prospect puts the foreign policy of the opposition in the international spotlight.

• Independent Media Challenge Erdogan’s Control Ahead Turkey’s Election

  With Turkey nearing hotly contested presidential elections in May, international rights groups are condemning a crackdown on independent media that have challenged the incumbent president’s control of the mainstream media.

• US sanctions Turkey, UAE-based entities it accuses of aiding Russian war effort

  The US on Wednesday slapped sanctions on several entities based in Turkey and the United Arab Emirates which it said had violated US export controls and helped Russia’s war effort in Ukraine. The firms were included in a new list of sanctions rolled out by the US Treasury Department against more than 120 targets across over 20 countries and jurisdictions. Those sanctioned include a Cypriot "fixer" for a Russian oligarch, a Russian-controlled bank in Hungary and entities associated with Russia’s state-owned nuclear company, Rosatom.

• Deep Dive: Why normalization with Egypt is harder for Turkey than Iran

  Stumbling in Egypt, western powers also wanted to direct Arab politics through the Baghdad Pact, which Britain, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan and Turkey signed in 1955. Ankara sought to attract Jordan and Lebanon to the pact, in opposition against then-Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser’s (1918-70) idea of a common Arab state. During a 1958 tour of Beirut and Amman, the Turkish president at the time—Celal Bayar (1883-1986)—stated that "the borders of Turkey start from here."

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