Turkey’s election holds broader lessons. First, Erdoğan’s success is good news for other right-wing populists and strongmen, such as Narendra Modi in India and Donald Trump in the United States, who are likely to continue to use similar tactics and aggressive nationalist rhetoric to animate their base and deepen polarization.

Second, Turkey’s experience in the coming months will reveal the economic consequences of this type of politics, who will pay the price, and how foreign and domestic capital will respond. With authoritarianism often associated with economic mismanagement, what happens in Turkey will not stay in Turkey.

Daron Acemoglu, Professor of Economics at MIT, is a co-author (with Simon Johnson) of Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity (PublicAffairs, May 2023).

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2023.

www.project-syndicate.org