Second round ballot, May 28, 2023 Turkish presidential election (Kadı Kadı via Wikimedia Commons) On May 28, 2023, Recep Tayyip Erdogan won the second presidential run-off against opposition candidate Kemal Kilicdaroglu. On his re-election day, President Erdogan congratulated not only the Turkish people
On February 6, 2023, two earthquakes with magnitudes 7.8 and 7.5—the deadliest in Turkey’s history—hit the Syrian-Turkish border. At least 45,000 people died in Turkey. Another 6,000 lives were lost in Syria. The fallout of the catastrophic earthquake came as President Erdogan faces
Lebanese resilience is being severely tested by the ongoing financial crisis. Economic and social costs are overwhelming, and the middle class is disappearing as poverty spirals out of control. The Lebanese currency has almost lost 60 percent of its value compared to US
Like a typical adolescent, bent on asserting his phallic worth through projecting raw force right and left – thereby creating a constant scene – Turkey would remain interesting as a site of constant political and economic drama or tragedy, depending on who you
“A coup whose plotting was known beforehand, a coup not prevented, a coup whose consequences are abused for power is called a ‘controlled coup’. We demanded that all the measures against the putschists would be discussed in Parliament, but they did not… I
The ongoing crisis in the Gulf Region between the Saudi-led trio and Qatar that came in the wake of Donald Trump’s ‘orb diplomacy’ has presented yet another difficult test for Turkish ambition to gain notice as a regional power and to regain a
The denouement of the Turkish referendum melodrama, which has seen the ruling party’s proposal to change the country’s political system from parliamentary to presidential approved by a marginal percentage, marks the death of the Kemalist republic founded in 1923 and the birth of
Voters went to the polls April 16 to vote on a new draft constitution that would officially increase the powers of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The opponents of the bill including the Republican People’s Party (CHP), the main opposition party in Turkey’s
The ascendency of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) to power in the early 2000’s has ushered in seismic shifts in Turkish economic, political, cultural and ideological tectonic plates. After decades of suppression, marginalization, and sabotage by the Kemalists military elite, the Islamist
For some ten years now, Turkey’s regonal policies have been characterised by U-turns and changes of heart. Henceforth, Ankara is bogged down in the Syrian crisis, caught between Kurdish demands and the terrorist attacks of ISIS. On December 19, 2016, on the eve