The United States has long been willing to befriend unsavory foreign governments, sometimes with good reason. In a dangerous world, democracies cannot afford to alienate every nondemocracy. But any alliance with an autocratic regime requires at least a careful weighing of trade-offs. How valuable is the relationship to American interests? And how odious is the regime’s behavior?
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey has personified this dilemma for much of his 22 years in power. Turkey, at the crossroads of Europe, Asia and the Middle East, is an important American partner, with the second-largest military in NATO. Yet Turkey has been sliding toward autocracy over the past decade. Mr. Erdogan has changed its Constitution to expand his power, brought the courts under his control, manipulated elections, purged professors, shut down media organizations and arrested journalists and protesters.
Last month, Mr. Erdogan took the assault on democracy to a new level. With dissatisfaction with his government growing, it detained his likely opponent in the next presidential election, Ekrem Imamoglu, the popular mayor of Istanbul, along with almost 100 of Mr. Imamoglu’s associates on dubious charges. The arrests put Turkey on the path that Russia has traveled over the past two decades, in which a democratically elected leader uses the powers of his office to turn it into an autocracy. “This is more than the slow erosion of democracy,” Mr. Imamoglu wrote from Silivri Prison in these pages. “It is the deliberate dismantling of our republic’s institutional foundations.”
The response from the rest of the world has been weak. A short time after Mr. Imamoglu’s arrest, President Trump said of Mr. Erdogan, “I happen to like him, and he likes me.” Many European leaders stayed quiet. The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, said only that the arrest was “deeply concerning.” There are no easy answers, given Turkey’s strategic importance and Mr. Erdogan’s grip on power. But the world’s democracies are getting the balance wrong. They can do more to support Turkey’s people and pressure Mr. Erdogan.
A crucial point is that Turkish voters seem to have tired of Mr. Erdogan. If elections were held today, Mr. Imamoglu would probably win, according to polls and political analysts. A self-described social democrat, Mr. Imamoglu, 54, is a member of the Republican People’s Party, which Mustafa Kemal Ataturk founded in 1919 as a resistance group and which later became the first governing party of the modern Turkish republic. The party is committed to a secular government for Turkey.
Mr. Imamoglu became mayor of Istanbul in 2019 in an upset victory over Mr. Erdogan’s candidate — two upset victories, in fact, because Mr. Erdogan’s party annulled the first vote and Mr. Imamoglu then won a second election more decisively. He has since compiled an impressive governing record, cleaning pollution in the Golden Horn, Istanbul’s main waterway, and providing free milk for children. His stance on external affairs has been moderate; he condemned Hamas for its terrorist attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, and has since criticized Israel for its assault on Gaza. Mr. Erdogan, by contrast, has praised Hamas as a liberation group, and called for Israel’s destruction.
