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
“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
ABSTRACT During the last decade, Turkish foreign policy exhibited a heightened interest in the Middle East thereby inaugurating a sharp departure from a long foreign policy tradition which relegated the region to the backwater. The conspicuous examples of this shift are Turkey’s keen
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
Turkey’s modern republican history is fraught with periodic political, economic, cultural and intellectual crises. An heir of a once sprawling and powerful empire, the country has been a scene of competing and often diametrically opposite ideas and visions of its identity, its place
Eastern Aleppo has fallen today, but looking at the root causes that paved the way to that fall you will realize it was inevitable not because the Baath forces and their allies are stronger or the Islamist factions are weaker but because the