“We need to teach the United States a lesson in this election,” President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said on Sunday. The president, who will face the opposition bloc’s candidate and Republican People’s Party (CHP) leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu as his leading contender, was angered over the latter’s meeting with U.S. Ambassador Jeff Flake. As a result, he said he wouldn’t receive Flake anymore.
Flake met Kılıçdaroğlu last week at the CHP offices. A brief statement by the embassy said it was “part of continuing conversations with Turkish political parties on issues of mutual interest between our two countries.” But such preelection visits triggered an alarm in Türkiye, which is engaged in a volatile relationship with the U.S., and Washington is governed by a president who was openly hostile toward Erdoğan in the past.
Though he tried to maintain balanced ties with Ankara, Biden’s remarks in 2020, before he took office, are still fresh in the memory of the Turkish public. “What I think we should be doing is taking a very different approach to him now, making it clear that we support opposition leadership,” Biden said in a New York Times interview, adding that Erdoğan had to pay the price. They should encourage the opposition to defeat Erdoğan.
“Joe Biden spoke, and now you see what his ambassador here does,” Erdoğan told an audience during a visit to the Idealists’ Club in Istanbul, an affiliate of his Justice and Development Party (AK Party) ally, Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). “He visited (Kılıçdaroğlu). It is a shame. You are an ambassador, and you have to know how to act. You should be engaged with President (not Kılıçdaroğlu),” he said.
“I wonder if he will be ashamed to ask for an appointment from my office. But I tell him now. Our doors are closed to him from now on because he does not know his place. You should know how an ambassador should act,” Erdoğan said.
Türkiye and the U.S., which are still close allies in NATO, still have outstanding issues, especially since Biden took office. A lagging F-16 sale by the U.S. to Türkiye is among them. Türkiye is also critical of U.S. support for the PKK's Syrian offshoot, the YPG, under the guise of a fight against the Daesh terrorist group.
Although Erdoğan’s AK Party is aligned at a position in the international community neither fully pro-Western nor fully supportive of other world powers, anti-American sentiment became more visible in the Turkish public, especially after Biden’s remarks which are viewed as an intervention to another country’s domestic affairs even by the Turkish opposition.
The opposition bloc led by Kılıçdaroğlu found almost a united front of support in the Western media recently, with more anti-Turkish and anti-Erdoğan coverage adorning the pages of publications like The Economist. Most articles in the Western press with an opposition bias portray Erdoğan as an autocrat and Türkiye as a country backsliding into a dictatorship. In contrast, the Kılıçdaroğlu-led opposition bloc is portrayed as “a new hope.” Anti-Erdoğan stance most recently manifested itself in a Wall Street Journal article penned by former U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton, who called his readers to support the opposition and NATO to force Türkiye out the alliance if Erdoğan wins the elections.
Flake already angered Turkish officials after he joined fellow ambassadors to shut down the missions last year over “security concerns.” Though the U.S. did not shut down its consulate in Istanbul after a heightened terrorism alert (which was denied by Türkiye), Flake was criticized by Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu. “Türkiye has the misfortune of having U.S. ambassadors seeking to plot coups in our country. Every U.S. ambassador has been engaged in efforts to harm Türkiye. They also try to dispel same advice to ambassadors of other countries,” Soylu said in February, implying that Flake urged fellow diplomats to shut down their Istanbul consulates. Soylu has also said they were also aware of “which journalists” the U.S. ambassador “directed” to pen articles (against Türkiye). “I openly tell them to get their dirty hands off Türkiye,” Soylu said cryptically.
