Turkey, with politics more important to oil and gas than its minor status as a producer would suggest, holds potentially ironic elections this month.
Scheduled 16 months early by an autocratic president with dubious commitment to voting integrity, the outcome should be easily predictable. It’s not.
Turkey is an important transit country for pipeline oil and gas. It will become more so when the Southern Gas Corridor linking the Caspian with Europe is complete and if the Turkstream pipeline materializes to carry Russian gas across the Black Sea.
Ankara did not endear itself to the European Union when it welcomed the Turkstream route ashore after Europe resisted landfall in Bulgaria by the forerunner South Stream project.
And it incurred further EU scorn by dispatching warships last February to keep a Saipem drillship off an Eni drilling location offshore Cyprus.
Turkey claims territory in Cyprus’s Exclusive Economic Zone and thinks Turkish Cypriots should share in energy decisions and prospective wealth.
It will drill its own well offshore Cyprus—planning, according to news reports, to spud just before the elections June 24.
For President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP), victory once seemed foreordained.
In April 2017, they instigated constitutional changes strengthening the presidency. They apparently assumed the AKP could not lose its parliamentary majority.
After several missteps attesting to AKP heavy-handedness, that now seems possible. And Erdogan, blamed increasingly for Turkish economic trouble, faces candidates from vibrant opposition parties committed to rallying behind any challenger able to force a runoff.
“While Turkish polls need to be read cautiously,” write Brookings Institution analysts Kemal Kirisci and Kumal Onayli in a May 29 essay, “many of them now suggest a high likelihood that the upcoming presidential election will be decided in a runoff and that Erdogan’s AKP will fail to retain its majority in parliament.”
And a supposedly strengthened president would face an opposition with “a greater say in policymaking than it has had for at least a decade.”
(From the subscription area of www.ogj.com, posted June 1, 2018; author’s email: [email protected])