In May 2023, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan won the Turkish presidential elections for the third time since 2014 and has been the most powerful Turkish politician in a generation. Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the opposition candidate, had pledged to restore trust with Brussels and Washington and seemed eager to unfreeze the country's EU accession process. However, Kılıçdaroğlu lost to Erdogan by more than 2 million votes.
We wanted to find out if and how will this election impact Turkey's relations with the European Union. In this episode, the executive director of EU Watch, Michael Thaidigsmann is hosting Dimitar Bechev, lecturer at the School of Global and Area Studies at the University of Oxford. Bechev is also a visiting scholar at Carnegie Europe, focusing on Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. He is the author of the books "Turkey Under Erdogan: How a Country Turned from Democracy and the West" and "Rival Power: Russia in Southeast Europe".
