Two major developments were witnessed in the second week of 2018 in Turkish politics.
This column’s title does not reflect the writer’s opinion but that of Turkey’s Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu.
Immediately after Turkey’s deadly July 2016 coup attempt parliament approved a request from the government to impose a state of emergency, with the justification that it would allow a better and more efficient fight against members of the Fethullahist Terror Organization (FETÖ), accused of being behind the attempted putsch.
Most of 2017 was difficult and troubled for Turkish diplomacy, with crises and tensions on multiple fronts - from the United States to Europe and the Middle East.
Last year around this time, many in Ankara and government officials were very hopeful that the election of Donald Trump as the new president of the United States would work in the best interests of Turkey with the projection that the new administration would be more cooperative in the extradition of Fethullah Gülen and on Turkey’s concerns over the role of the People’s Protection Units (YPG) in the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in Syria.
The vote on Jerusalem at the United Nations General Assembly on Dec. 21 is not just a strong response and denunciation against United States President Donald Trump’s unilateral, illegitimate decision on one of the most sensitive issues in the world but also a development that has set a historic precedent in international relations.
On April 16, a narrow win in a key referendum allowed President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) to overhaul the Turkish governance system into an executive-presidency model.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s unilateral recognition of Jerusalem as the “undivided” capital of Israel on Dec. 6 sparked a fresh strain in an already unstable Middle East with concerns over renewed tension between Palestinians and Israelis.
As usual, Turkish diplomacy is going through yet another hectic period due to developments on multiple fronts.
