To our Institute, Chris Den Hond is a well-known reporter and author already for many years now. Chris recently published on the journalistic platform ‘Orient XXI’ an interesting review under the title “Election of Joe Biden and Internal Contestations, the New Hardships of Erdoğan”.
With his extensive knowledge of Turkey and the Kurdish issues, Chris is well placed to analyse the problems that the Turkish regime is currently facing.
For president Erdoğan, the problems are situated both abroad and in the interior country.
Ankara faces increasingly strained relations with Washington now that Joe Biden has been elected president of the US. Brett McGurk was recently appointed White House adviser for the Middle East. The return to the forefront of McGurk is not to everyone’s taste in Ankara. In 2015, McGurk supervised the international military coalition in Syria and became somehow an ally for the Syrian Kurds.
In the interior country, it seems that Erdoğan has fewer and fewer allies, with the soul exception of the MHP, the Nationalist Action Party. To be more concrete, the party of the radical right.
Chris refers to an interview with Fehim Taştekin – a Turkish journalist for ‘Al Monitor’ – who summarizes the developments of recent years as follows: “… At first, Erdoğan needed the Gülenists against the army, then he needed the Kurds against the Gülenists, and when that didn’t work, he turned to the radical right to establish an authoritarian presidential regime.”
“The large democratic opposition in Turkey is impatiently waiting for the fall of “Sultan Erdoğan” before Turkey sinks into the pit of obscurantism“, Chris stated in its article.
Herewith the link to Chris’s review: “Election of Joe Biden and Internal Contestations, the New Hardships of Erdoğan”
