President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has started talking about Turkey’s borders, hinting they should be shifted outwards a bit. In Syria and Iraq, his army is involved in wars over territory once ruled from Istanbul. Maps of a Greater Turkey have circulated.
That has led to speculation that Erdogan, fresh from surviving an attempted coup, wants to crown his 14-year rule in Turkey by annexing chunks of its neighbors. But analysts see a more mundane domestic calculation behind the rhetoric: they say the president is really trying to expand his own powers, not his country’s frontiers.
Erdogan still hankers after making his office the focus of all power in Turkey, instead of the largely ceremonial post it was before he took over — and, on paper, still is. But he doesn’t have support in parliament to make that constitutional change — and maybe not in the country, either, if it went to a referendum. In both cases, the likeliest bloc of voters to be won over are nationalists who aren’t at all averse to talk of Turkey’s historic claims on nearby lands, or military attacks on Kurdish groups who live there.
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