At the NATO summit in Ankara (7–8 July 2026), Erdoğan gave every allied leader a Sarsilmaz revolver engraved with their name, complete with live ammunition and a letter waiving Turkey's own export controls. A bizarre gift — and a fitting summary of the day: a summit billed as being about collective security turned out to be, above all, an arms fair. The final declaration announces over $50 billion in new procurement: $40 billion in counter-drone capabilities over the next five years, more than $26 billion in integrated air and missile defence, contracts with Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Rheinmetall, Saab. Italy is in the mix too, through Leonardo: a seven-year, €200 million deal with Accenture for NATO communications, joint trials with Turkish firm Baykar on the Kızılelma combat drone, agreements with Diehl Defence, General Dynamics and Thales on ammunition and special-forces communications. In exchange for Turkish loyalty during the war between Israel, the United States and Iran, Trump lifted CAATSA sanctions on Ankara, reopening the door to F-35s. Fresh off the plane, he said he'd only come "because Erdoğan was hosting" — a blunt, unmistakably personal endorsement.

The summit also addressed Ukraine: €70 billion committed for 2026 in equipment and training, support that is right and necessary against Russian aggression. But while heads of state signed away, in a locked-down Ankara — protests banned for two weeks, over 56,000 police on the streets — officers arrested more than 200 people: students, lawyers, trade unionists, journalists.

The EU and the United States treat Erdoğan as an indispensable ally: energy transit routes, migration, NATO, Syria, Libya. His international standing has never been higher — and Ankara knows it: it has asked NATO allies to lift restrictions on defence trade so it can join joint European rearmament programmes, offering a $24 billion investment in its own "Steel Dome" missile shield in return. A door the EU may well be tempted to open in the coming months.

As so often with authoritarian regimes, Turkey's economy has been ailing for a while now. The "orthodox turn" led since 2023 by Finance Minister Mehmet Şimşek marked a break from Erdoğan's own eccentric theory that high rates cause inflation rather than cure it. Back on conventional monetary footing, the central bank has pushed rates to 50%. The results are mixed at best: official inflation has fallen from 85% in 2022 to 32% today (the independent ENAG index puts it above 55%), yet it remains the highest in the G20, the policy rate still sits at 37%, and the lira has lost 80% of its value since 2018. Behind these numbers lies stark inequality: a Gini coefficient of 0.410 by Turkey's own statistics office, TÜİK, or 0.461 by Eurostat — either way, the highest in Europe, against an EU average of 0.344. The richest 20% earn nine times what the poorest 20% do, double the European average. One in five Turks cannot meet basic needs.

Political prisoners. A 2021 Council of Europe report found Turkey held 95% of all terrorism convicts in Europe: 30,555 out of 32,006. Silivri, the continent's largest prison by inmate count — 22,000 people held in a facility built for 11,000 — has housed Osman Kavala, a businessman and philanthropist detained since 2017 despite two binding European Court of Human Rights rulings ordering his release; Selahattin Demirtaş, who as HDP co-chair took his pro-Kurdish party past the 10% threshold in June 2015, stripping the AKP of its absolute majority in the last genuine democratic shock Turkey has seen — arrested in November 2016, now serving 42 years; and Figen Yüksekdağ, his co-chair, sentenced to 30. Istanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, Erdoğan's leading rival for the 2028 presidency, arrested in March 2025, faces 143 charges. At least 58 journalists were behind bars as of early 2026. Their fate largely rests on international attention: pressure from the European Court, foreign governments and public opinion has already won releases and reduced sentences elsewhere. Silence leaves the field open — and at the Ankara summit, not a single word was said about any of this.

Universities. After the 2016 coup attempt — which some believe was staged from within, an "auto-coup" — more than 30,000 teachers and 7,000 academics were dismissed, with no pensions and no protections. At Boğaziçi, the secular state university long seen as a symbol of an internationally-minded Turkey, Erdoğan has since 2021 appointed rectors directly, bypassing internal elections. In May 2026 he also signed the decree revoking the licence of Bilgi, a private university with 20,000 students known for its liberal bent in the social sciences, eight months after its owners — the Can Holding group — had their assets seized in a money-laundering and tax-evasion probe. On paper, a judicial matter concerning the owners; in practice, the closure by presidential decree of an independent institution, mid-academic-year.

A society rewritten. İmam Hatip religious schools grew from 730 institutions in 2012 to over 1,600 by 2016, enrolment rising from 94,000 to 458,000. Hagia Sophia became a mosque again in 2020, after 86 years as a secular museum. Evolution has vanished from school curricula; mandatory Islamic ethics classes have taken its place, everywhere.

Women's rights. In 2021 Turkey withdrew from the Istanbul Convention, the treaty against violence toward women signed in that very city — the first country to ratify it, the first to leave. Femicides have not slowed: 294 women were killed in 2025. Perpetrators frequently receive reduced sentences for having been "provoked," while victims' private lives go on trial instead. And as women keep dying at home, the government wants them confined there more than ever: 2025, declared the "Year of the Family," became an occasion to push women toward part-time work and treat their economic independence as a problem to be fixed.

The presidential family. Power in Turkey revolves around Erdoğan's own circle — son, son-in-law, and a handful of loyalists. The dossier on its enrichment has been public since 2013, when a corruption probe implicated Erdoğan directly, along with his son Bilal and son-in-law Berat Albayrak, later finance minister and deputy chair of Turkey's $40 billion sovereign wealth fund. Authenticated wiretaps recorded Erdoğan instructing his son to dispose of large sums of cash during police searches; the investigation was buried by replacing the judges handling it. Bild, The Guardian and the investigative outlet Nordic Monitor have documented opaque family holdings, trusts in the Isle of Man, offshore structures in Malta, and alleged dealings in sanctioned Russian oil.

Regionally, Ankara turns military intervention into commercial leverage: in Libya it is now the leading supplier ahead of China and Egypt; in post-Assad Syria it is targeting €5 billion in trade within two years and leading the reconstruction of al-Sharaa's army.

Those of us who knew Istanbul in 2013, when young people marched through Gezi Park, or in 2015, when a deal with the Kurds seemed within reach and Erdoğan lost his absolute majority, opening what looked like a genuine prospect of peace and freedom, now watch its leaders languish in prison for years on end, universities placed under guardianship, the square silenced — while the EU and its member states smile and shake hands with Erdoğan and his circle, making themselves complicit through their guilty silence. It is genuinely sad, because things could have gone so differently. But I am certain of this: it is a mistake. How much safer — not just fairer, safer — would an alliance with a truly democratic Turkey be, one whose peoples, Kurds included, were finally free to speak their own language and choose who governs them? A free Turkey would be a bulwark, not a risk. Today we are backing the wrong man and his circle, and calling it pragmatism when it is nothing but cynical shortsightedness.