Erdogan made severe strategic mistakes: Analyst

Press TV has conducted an interview with Jeffrey Steinberg, a senior editor with the Executive Intelligence Review, in Leesburg, to ask for his insight on the failure of Turkey’s ruling party to win a majority in recent parliamentary elections.

The following is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: First of all, where did it go wrong for Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AK Party in your opinion, that it has lost its overall majority?

Steinberg: Well, the AK Party had built up its strength and its successful electoral gains in all of the recent elections on the basis of – number one – the fact that the country was moving ahead economically; and number two, that they had adopted a foreign policy of striking a balance and not seeking any kinds of problems with any of their neighbors.

They’ve fully abandoned that policy by now officially and publically aligning with Saudi Arabia and Qatar and implicitly with Israel in carrying out the campaign to overthrow the Assad government in Syria even at the expense of building support for radical Islamist factions, including the Islamic State and the Nusra Front, which now forms the core of the openly Saudi-backed army of conquest.

So, I think everything has gone wrong and I think it’s important to bear in mind that the fact that they only got 41 percent of the vote has to be weighed against the fact that President Erdogan had really staked everything on winning an overwhelming parliamentary majority. He was going for minimally 330 seats out of the 550 in the Turkish parliament, because he intended to basically change the constitution and move from a parliamentary to a strong presidential system in order to perpetuate his own grip on power.

And I think he’s bitten off far more than he can chew and he made a severe strategic miscalculation that is going to now force a very fundamental rethink of where Turkey stands in the world.

Press TV: With regards to Erdogan’s measures or aims to change the constitution and give more powers to the president, do you think that issue is now done and over with or do you think Erdogan is still going to try and get something out of it, considering so much is on the line for him?

Steinberg: No, he’s lost that battle decisively. He not only lost it by the loss of eight percent of the vote from the last parliamentary elections when the party got 49 percent of the vote, but he lost it inside the AKP itself, where there is strong and growing opposition to his attempts to essentially create a parallel government structure out of the presidency, ignoring the existing constitution.

So, he’s made some profound errors; and right now, I think the more fundamental question is whether this is the first sign of the beginning of the end of Erdogan and the AKP’s long run of power.

ABN/HJL

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