In exchange for handing over the Jamal Khashoggi dossier to Riyadh, the Turkish president secures Saudi financial support for the next elections.
In twenty years in power, Recep Tayyip Erdogan has always been able to demonstrate that he was a pragmatic political animal, capable of adapting his position to the realities of his country, especially one year before a high-risk presidential election.
However, the current economic situation in Turkey is serious. Inflation exceeded 60% and the currency experienced a sharp devaluation, impoverishing more and more Turks. The international context and the war in Ukraine, which are disrupting the energy market, are therefore impacting Turkey, which imports its gas from Russia. Given its relative neutrality in the conflict and a certain leaning in favor of its Ukrainian partner, Turkey naturally needs to secure other sources of supply, since it produces almost none of the energy that she consumes. The United Arab Emirates for gas, Saudi Arabia for oil, stand out as obvious interlocutors. Driven by economic and financial necessity, the Turkish president therefore made his first official visit to Saudi Arabia in five years at the end of April, which marks a turning point in relations between Turkey and the Wahhabi kingdom.
From the Ottoman Empire, the story of distant relations between Turkey and Saudi Arabia
Erdogan indeed presented it as the testimony of a “common desire to open a new era of cooperation between two brotherly countries, with historical, cultural and human ties”. A surprising assertion given Turkey’s ambivalent relationship with the Arab-Muslim world, precisely because of historical and cultural ties. No Ottoman sultan has ever performed the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, although Turkey has been the guardian of Islam’s holy sites for four centuries. The Arabian Peninsula has always been an area of turbulence for the Ottoman Empire, and it is in particular its reconquest of the Hejaz and the holy places, confiscated by the founders of the first Saudi kingdom, which has permanently tarnished relations between Turks and Arabs.
It ended with the execution by beheading of Abdallah Ibn Saud, the ancestor of the Sauds currently in power, a family memory that generated lasting resentment towards Istanbul. Conversely, the young Republic of Atatürk born in 1923 retained a mistrust and a certain contempt towards the Arab people, whose revolts contributed to the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. This mistrust also explains Mustapha Kemal’s desire to erase the traces of Arab-Muslim culture from his new Turkey. But paradoxically, the Turkish Republic maintained good diplomatic relations with the new kingdoms or Arab states, including with the Saudi kingdom, but without real proximity, the secularism of the Kemalists not doing well with the Muslim theocracies.
The threat of the democratic “Turkish model”
Through his visit, Erdogan also assured that he wanted to promote “peace, dialogue and diplomacy” in the region. However, its foreign policy in the Middle East could not be further from it, especially since 2011 and the Arab Spring, the date from which relations between Turkey and the oil monarchies of the Persian Gulf deteriorated considerably. Motivated by the neo-Ottoman ideology of the Islamo-conservative AKP party, Ankara’s regional ambitions and its desire to present itself as a counter-model of an ideal and democratic Muslim society, inspired by the political Islam of the Muslim Brotherhood, worry Saudi Arabia, which fears that its position as leader of the Sunni Muslim world will be dangerously challenged by the “Turkish model”. Saudis and Emiratis have therefore united throughout the decade against the Turkey-Qatar axis, the two camps clashing by proxy, particularly in Syria and Libya.
Nevertheless, between an excessively costly regional strategy for a country with a fragile economy, and the possibility of bailing out the state coffers and regaining social peace in Turkey, Erdogan seems to have made his choice, at least temporarily. His visit to Saudi Arabia, which was to deepen bilateral cooperation between the two countries in defence, energy, finance and food security, attests to this. But this resumption of dialogue could not take place without compensation: the arrival of the Turkish president was indeed conditional on the transmission to Riyadh of the file on the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.
The assassination of the Saudi journalist in the middle of Istanbul in 2018 had considerably cooled relations between the two countries, the Turkish president multiplying the criticism against Saudi Arabia and thus justifying his rivalry with the self-proclaimed leader of the Sunni Muslim world. Although Erdogan declared following this case that there was no justice in Saudi Arabia, the Turkish judicial authorities finally decided to transfer the file to Riyadh, which de facto amounts to preventing its treatment and the in question of Crown Prince Mohammed Ben Salman, accused of being the sponsor of the murder. This is the high point of a case that will now be closed without justice being done. With his “normalization” against “concessions” deal, Erdogan will have already obtained the lifting of the unofficial boycott imposed by Riyadh on Turkish imports, as well as investment agreements and currency exchanges.
Paying electoral strategy for Erdogan?
Going back on its principles for the price of its re-election, is it nevertheless a relevant bet? It is indeed possible to imagine that Riyadh will not stop on such a good path, and will formulate new demands with Ankara to grant its financial support, in particular with regard to the adventurism of the Turkish president in the Middle East. Erdogan will then have to engage in a difficult balancing act to preserve a fundamental element of the AKP program and maintain the link with its electoral base, while reassuring its new partners internationally. Admittedly, this will not be the first time that the Turkish president has changed his speech according to circumstances. But it remains to be seen whether it will once again pay off in 2023.