Live updates: Turkey’s Erdogan leads in latest election tally

May 28, 2023 admin-dominor

11:50 a.m. ET, May 28, 2023

What would a change in leadership mean for Turkey’s ties with Russia?

From CNN’s Tamara Qiblawi, Isil Sariyuce, and Nadeen Ebrahim

Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, left, meets Russian President Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia (CICA) in Astana, Kazakhstan, on October 13.

Murat Kula/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Turkey has a “special” and growing relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin despite mounting pressure on Ankara to help bolster Western sanctions against Moscow, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in an exclusive interview ahead of the presidential election runoff.

We are not at a point where we would impose sanctions on Russia like the West have done. We are not bound by the West’s sanctions,” Erdogan told CNN’s Becky Anderson. “We are a strong state and we have a positive relationship with Russia.”

“Russia and Turkey need each other in every field possible,” he added.

Erdogan and his principal rival, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, have diverged on a number of foreign policy issues, including diplomacy with the West and Russia.

Kilicdaroglu has vowed to repair years of strained diplomacy with the West.

He has also said he would not seek to emulate Erdogan’s personality-driven relationship with Putin, and instead recalibrate Ankara’s relationship to Moscow to be “state-driven.”

But in the days leading up to the first round of the presidential race on May 14, Kilicdaroglu sharpened his tone on the Kremlin, accusing it of meddling in Turkey’s election and threatening to rupture the relationship between the two countries.

By contrast, Erdogan has doubled down on his relationship with Putin – and he thinks the West should follow suit. “The West is not leading a very balanced approach,” he told CNN. “You need a balanced approach towards a country such as Russia, which would have been a much more fortunate approach.”

Some background: Turkey, a NATO member that has the alliance’s second-largest army, has strengthened its ties with Russia, and in 2019 even bought weapons from it in defiance of the US. Erdogan has raised eyebrows in the West by continuing to maintain close relations with Russia as it continues its Ukraine onslaught, and has caused a headache for NATO’s expansion plans by stalling the membership of Finland and Sweden.

When the US Ambassador to Ankara Jeff Flake paid a visit in March to Kilicdaroglu Erdogan lashed out against him, calling the US diplomat’s visit a “shame,” and warning that Turkey needs to “teach the US a lesson in this election.”

Analysts have said that even if Erdogan were to be ousted in the polls, a foreign policy u-turn for Turkey is not a given. While figures close to the opposition have indicated that if victorious, it would reorient Turkey back to the West, others say core foreign policy issues are likely to remain unchanged.

Turkey has, however, also been useful to its Western allies under Erdogan. Last year Ankara helped mediate a landmark grains export deal between Ukraine and Russia, and even provided Ukraine with drones that played a part in countering Russian attacks.

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