Diplomacy & Defense Think Tank News

On December 14, Istanbul’s Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, was sentenced to two years and seven months in prison. He was convicted of calling the members of Turkey’s Supreme Electoral Council “fools” in 2019, following their decision to rerun Istanbul’s municipal election. Given the baseless nature of the accusation, this was plainly a politically motivated verdict.

Legally, the ruling is not final. There is an appeal process, which would normally take more than a year to complete. And even if İmamoğlu loses his appeal, he will not go to prison as sentences of less than three years are not served. He will, however, be banned from standing in elections or holding any elected office. While the case lacks any legal basis, it will nevertheless have significant political implications.

One likely outcome would be to hand the post of mayor of Istanbul to the Justice and Development Party (AKP). The AKP already holds a majority in the municipal council, which would elect the new mayor. More importantly, the verdict will impact the presidential election scheduled for June 2023. İmamoğlu is one of three potential opposition candidates, along with Ankara Mayor Mansur Yavaş and Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, leader of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP). Many experts would argue that İmamoğlu is President Tayyip Erdoğan’s strongest challenger. The court’s politically charged ruling reinforces this assessment.

İmamoğlu’s political future

The irony is not lost on anyone. In 1998, while mayor of Istanbul, Erdoğan himself was banned from politics for “inciting hatred,” after reciting a poem at a political rally. At the time, Turkey’s then very powerful generals considered Erdoğan dangerously popular and hoped to remove him from political life. In fact, their strategy backfired and his deceitful removal from politics only increased his popularity. He soon forced his way back into politics and became prime minister in 2003.

İmamoğlu’s case has been widely compared with Erdoğan’s ban from politics. The verdict already seems to have given a significant boost to İmamoğlu’s popularity. However, the impact on İmamoğlu’s ability to stand as the opposition’s joint presidential candidate is still unclear. His supporters argue that the verdict would not normally come into effect before the election. So he could ride this wave of popularity as the joint presidential candidate. Others believe that this move would be a too risky, as the politically motivated courts could choose to confirm the verdict at a moment that would leave the opposition without a viable candidate. Erdoğan is probably counting on using the case as a “sword of Damocles” to prevent İmamoğlu’s candidacy without finalizing the legal process.

The end of competitive elections?

The verdict also has important implications for democracy in Turkey. It represents a qualitative leap in Turkey’s long process of autocratization. The country has long ceased to be an electoral democracy, and is now defined as a “competitive authoritarian regime.” Under such a regime, elections are not a sham – as observed in fully authoritarian systems – but the playing field is skewed against the opposition. The opposition does have a genuine chance of winning an election. That is the competitive dimension. But winning is an uphill struggle because the electoral process is extremely flawed and designed to favor the incumbent. In short, elections are free but not fair.

Over the past decade Turkey has become a textbook example of competitive authoritarianism. Media freedom, freedom of expression, and freedom of organization have been severely curtailed. State resources have been used to support the ruling AKP while institutions has clearly worked to undermine the opposition. Still, the system did remain competitive. Indeed, in the 2019 municipal elections the opposition won most of the major cities including Istanbul and Ankara. Ever since that defeat, Erdoğan has been working to undermine the competitive element of the political system.

Immediately after the municipal elections, Erdoğan’s government forced the courts to arrange a rerun in Istanbul. The result was a bigger margin of victory for opposition candidate İmamoğlu. The AKP also removed all mayors elected on the ticket of the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP), alleging that they supported terrorism, and appointed “trustees” in their place. There is also an ongoing court case seeking to close down the HDP. The case against İmamoğlu is the most ambitious of such moves, targeting Erdoğan’s most potent rival. Erdoğan’s efforts to remove his political rivals from the field in advance of the 2023 presidential election represents a deliberate attempt to undermine the competitive dimension of the regime.

This should ring alarm bells in Europe. While competitive authoritarian regimes are by nature unstable and can potentially revert to electoral democracy, this becomes very difficult once the competitive element has been lost. İmamoğlu’s conviction suggests that the government is ready to completely abolish the competitive dimension. This also raises serious concerns over the integrity of the electoral process. European institutions should monitor the electoral process in Turkey very closely. As the saying goes: “only amateurs steal elections on election day.” Erdoğan has reminded us that he is no amateur. If they are to assess whether elections are free and fair, monitoring groups need to scrutinize the entire process, not just the vote itself.

The Western Balkans should join the European Union (EU) “as soon as possible”, according to statements by the Chancellor of Germany at the Berlin Process summit in early November 2022. The Berlin Process consists of a series of events and meetings that have taken place annually since 2014 between individual EU member states and the countries of the Western Balkans. It differs from other EU initiatives in that inter­national financial and EU institutions are involved alongside individual EU states, such as Germany as the format’s initiator, and it primarily addresses issues of eco­nomic and regional cooperation. Although the Berlin Process has already produced many ambitious ideas, such as the common regional market, the implementation of the agreements by the Western Balkan states has often stalled. In the future, Ger­many and the EU should insist more emphatically on the implementation of adopted agreements, because the Berlin Process has the potential to restore the declining credibility of the Western Balkan states’ prospects for EU accession.

Am 1. Januar 2023 tritt Luiz Inácio »Lula« da Silva seine dritte Präsidentschaft in Brasilien an. Damit endet gleichzeitig die von vielen politischen Beobachtern als destruktiv eingestufte Amtszeit von Präsident Jair Bolsonaro. Vieles deutet darauf hin, dass es zu einem geordneten Prozess der Übergabe des Präsidentenamts kommen wird, obwohl Bolsonaro seine Niederlage bislang nicht eingestanden hat und seine Anhänger Protestkundgebungen angekündigt haben. Der gewählte Präsident wird seine Regierungspolitik auf neue Grundlagen stellen müssen. Eine Rückkehr zu den Leitlinien seiner früheren Präsidentschaft wird nicht möglich sein, denn die Verwerfungen der Regierungszeit Bolsonaros lassen sich nicht ignorieren. Angesichts der komplexen innenpolitischen Lage – nicht zuletzt die für ihn ungünstigen Mehrheitsverhältnisse im nationalen Parlament – wird es für Lula schwierig werden, die starke Ablehnung seiner Person im eignen Land zu mindern und zudem die hohen inter­natio­nalen Erwartungen an eine geordnete Regierungsführung zu erfüllen.

Der Westbalkan solle »so schnell wie möglich« in die EU, erklärte der Bundeskanzler auf dem Gipfel des Berliner Prozesses Anfang November 2022. Der Berliner Prozess besteht aus einer Reihe von Veranstaltungen und Treffen, die seit 2014 jährlich zwi­schen einzelnen EU-Mitgliedstaaten und den Ländern des Westbalkans stattfinden. Er unterscheidet sich von anderen EU-Initiativen dadurch, dass neben internatio­nalen Finanz- und EU-Institutionen einzelne EU-Staaten beteiligt sind, wie zum Bei­spiel Deutschland als Initiator des Formats, und setzt sich primär mit wirtschaft­lichen und Fragen der regionalen Kooperation auseinander. Wenngleich der Berliner Prozess schon viele Ideen wie den gemeinsamen regionalen Markt generiert hat, hakt es oft an der Implementierung der Vereinbarungen durch die Westbalkanstaaten. Deutschland und die EU sollten künftig nachdrücklicher auf der Umsetzung verabschiedeter Abkommen bestehen, denn der Berliner Prozess hat das Potential, die im Westbalkan nachlassende Glaubwürdigkeit der EU-Beitrittsperspektive wieder zu erhöhen.

Die Bundesregierung hat sich das Ziel gesetzt, eine Strategie für die internationale Digitalpolitik zu entwickeln. Das Vorhaben fällt in eine Zeit, in der digitale Techno­lo­gien immer häufiger zum Gegenstand geopolitischer Konflikte werden. Grundlegend ist als erstes zu klären, auf welche Fragen eine solche Strategie Antworten geben soll­te. Dazu bietet sich der internationale Vergleich an, außerdem der Abgleich mit wei­teren Strategieprozessen der Bundesregierung. Thematisch rücken so drei Bereiche in den Blick: die Handelspolitik im Verbund mit den Zielen von Datenschutz und Nach­haltigkeit, die Entwicklungszusammenarbeit insbesondere bei digitalen Infrastrukturen und schließlich der Schutz der Menschenrechte und der Demokratie im Wettstreit verschiedener Ordnungsmodelle des Digitalen. Gewissermaßen quer zu diesen drei thematischen Dimensionen liegt die Frage, wie in Zukunft die Koopera­tion in diesem Bereich gestaltet werden kann.

Die Covid-19-Pandemie und Russlands Angriffskrieg gegen die Ukraine haben die Staa­ten Lateinamerikas und der Karibik ebenso wie die Europäische Union – auf unterschiedliche Weise – vor große Herausforderungen gestellt. Zugleich offenbarten diese internationalen Krisen, wie wenig belastbar die Narrative sind, von denen die Bezie­hungen zwischen beiden Regionen normativ geprägt sein sollen: gemeinsame Werte, strategische Partnerschaft, Dialog auf Augenhöhe. Tatsächlich handelt es sich dabei um eine von Wunschdenken bestimmte Rhetorik, die der Wirklichkeit im wechsel­seitigen Verhältnis immer weniger gerecht wird. Die gemeinsame Grundlage bröckelt, und es fehlt an Projekten, die der Zusammenarbeit Sinn und Zweck ver­leihen. Solche Vorhaben hätten vor allem dann eine Chance auf Erfolg, wenn ab­weichende Sicht­weisen thematisiert und gegenseitige Erwartungen offen verhandelt würden. Anstatt von Gemeinsamkeiten auszugehen, sollte eine zukunftsträchtige Kooperation sich – im Rahmen variabler Formate – verstärkt auf Komplementari­täten stützen.

Während die Türkei die Sou­ve­rä­ni­tät und ter­ri­to­riale Inte­gri­tät der Ukraine grund­sätz­lich unter­stützt, pflegt sie sehr enge Bezie­hun­gen zu Russ­land. Daria Isa­chenko ana­ly­siert, welche Inter­es­sen dahinterstehen.

Russia’s War Against Ukraine and the Risks of Nuclear Escalation

Russlands Krieg gegen die Ukraine und die Risiken nuklearer Eskalation

Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi has consolidated his authoritarian regime in recent years. This has been accompanied by a significant increase in Cairo’s foreign debt, which more than tripled between June 2013 and March 2022. The country’s debt policy was directly linked to the presidential centre of power. The government managed a well-choreographed mix of incentives, threats, and concealment that made it possible to take out more and more new loans. The Egyptian military, on whose support President Sisi is dependent in order to assert his claim to power, is the main beneficiary of the debt policy. External debt helped to protect the revenues and assets of the armed forces, to finance major projects in which they could earn significant money, and to pursue an expansive military build-up. The instrumentalisation of debt policy for power politics increases the risk that Egypt will no longer be able to service its liabilities in the future. Above all, however, the misallocation of scarce financial resources under­mines the socio-economic development of the country and promotes police-state repression. The latter, in turn, favours the political instrumentalisation of debt policy for power politics, as it prevents any control of govern­ment action. In the future, Germany and its European partners should therefore tie bi­lateral lending as well as support for Egypt in its negotiations with international financial institutions to two conditions: firstly, the dismantling of military economic activities – whereby the assets of the armed forces must also be disclosed – and secondly, concrete steps towards ending police-state repression.

The UN Security Council is expected to renew the mandate of the United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO) in December 2022. The upcoming negotiations among council members will unfold against the backdrop of renewed fighting between the Armed Forces of the DRC (FARDC) and the M23 rebel group. And while several regional diplomatic initiatives are underway, the security and humanitarian conditions continue to worsen in the eastern provinces of the DRC, with persistent threats to human rights and the protection of civilians.

In this context, the International Peace Institute (IPI), Security Council Report, and the Stimson Center co-hosted a roundtable discussion on November 15, 2022. This roundtable offered a platform for member states, UN officials, civil society stakeholders, and independent experts to share their assessments of the situation in the DRC in a frank and collaborative manner. The discussion was intended to help the Security Council make more informed decisions with respect to the prioritization and sequencing of MONUSCO’s mandate and the mission’s strategic orientation and actions on the ground.

Participants agreed that MONUSCO’s strategic vision and priority tasks are still relevant to the UN’s overall engagement in the country. They also emphasized that the current mandate provides the mission with appropriate guidance to pursue the strategic direction provided by the Security Council, but some areas need to be refined for the mission to better address the ongoing crisis and new priorities. The mission will likely need to balance the following issues over the next mandate cycle:

• Strengthening MONUSCO’s capabilities to conduct proactive, robust, and mobile protection efforts in eastern DRC;
• Bridging the expectations gap on the protection of civilians by communicating what MONUSCO can achieve under its mandate as well as the limits of MONUSCO’s partnership with the FARDC;
• Establishing a constructive dialogue between MONUSCO and the East African Community’s regional force to deconflict and coordinate operations on the ground while encouraging compliance with international humanitarian law and international human rights law;
• Supporting the government’s efforts to build national capacity to implement its Demobilization, Disarmament, Community Recovery and Stabilization Program (P-DDRCS);
• Capitalizing on its good offices to coordinate and harmonize the Luanda and Nairobi processes;
• Expanding civic engagement in the formal political process and making the process more inclusive; and
• Working with regional partners to lay the groundwork for balanced bilateral agreements fostering long-term sustainable economic cooperation.