If — as seems increasingly likely — Turkey's autocratic President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is defeated for reelection on May 14, the outcome will almost certainly spell the admission of Sweden into NATO.
According to a recent poll by the Turkish polling service TEAM, opposition candidate Kemal Kilicdaroglu leads Erdogan —who has been in power 20 years, first as prime minister and then as president — by 47.4% to 44.4%.
Should no candidate win a majority on May 14, a runoff will be held on May 28. TEAM shows that in a hypothetical runoff, Kilicdaroglu would defeat Erdogan by 5 percentage points nationwide.
In terms of world politics, an enlarged NATO that includes Sweden will mean a thorn in the side of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine last year, Sweden has been providing military, civil, and financial support to the government of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Frequent Putin ally Erdogan has steadfastly vetoed Sweden's admission into NATO. So has Hungary, although it is widely felt that Prime Minister Viktor Orban would not like to be the lone roadblock to Sweden's long-sought goal to join NATO and may change his position if Erdogan is gone.
For his part, Kilicdaroglu, 74, leader of the Republican People's Party, or CHP, and main opposition leader of the Table of Six (the CHP plus five smaller parties united by opposition to Erdogan), has sent out signals he wants to revive Turkish relations with NATO and the EU. As Erdogan grew more authoritarian in recent years, Turkey's membership in both organizations was strained.
Unal Cevikoz, top foreign policy adviser to Kilicdaroglu, told reporters last week that he is "hopeful" the Turkish parliament will give its approval to letting Sweden into the U.N.
"The chances of Erdogan losing this month are probably 8 on a scale of 10," Cansu Camlibel, former Washington, D.C., bureau chief for the venerable Turkish publication Hurriyet, predicted to Newsmax. "Certainly the earthquake in February [which killed more than 56,000 people in Turkey and Syria] did not help him, and the rise in inflation and his failure to take action have helped the opposition."
Camlibel noted that consumer prices rose 2.9% in April, and there was a increase in the cost of food by 2.4% during the same period.
"So now The New York Times and other publications are starting to notice something is happening in Turkey," she said.
John Gizzi is chief political columnist and White House correspondent for Newsmax. For more of his reports, Go Here Now.
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