By not accepting defeat during the Istanbul elections on the 31 March, by a mere 13K majority, AKP might have prepared its own doom. The victory of Imamoglu is shifting the paradigm away from the traditional dichotomies that explained Turkish politics so well in the past.
There is a deeper and more dangerous reason why Erdogan’s Islamist party is not ready to accept a defeat in elections. This deeper reason relates to the classical dar al-Harb / dar al-Islam distinction that was a central motif in the Islamist discourse of the National Outlook, the ideological core of the AKP.
Despite the fact that Sunday’s elections were local elections, Erdogan saw it as a ‘matter of life and death’ and therefore the elections turned into a referendum. What people voted for was the Erdogan regime. The most important result of the elections is the fact that Erdogan has now entered his period of decline.
A pre-2011 Syria with Assad at the helm would be catastrophic to not only the Kurds but for other minorities and would signal to the region that you can kill over 600,000 civilians, target half your population and force them to be refugees and IDPs and still get away with it all. This is the message if the global coalition, led by the United States abandons the Kurds. For Kurds, anything less than autonomy in Syria is a loss.
Provided that American forces will eventually withdraw, Trump’s strategy, no matter how ambitious or theoretically promising it is, runs a serious risk, not unlike the one that the US faced in Iraq.
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