Poll Shows Weak Support For Turkey’s Syria Policies
A recent poll shows that Turkey’s interventionist policies have little domestic support and that Turkey remains wary of outside alliances, writes Kadri Gursel.
In Turkey, it has been widely assumed that the new Turkish foreign policy managed by Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu has been a major source of popularity and support for the AKP rule and for Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. But that hasn't been so for a while now.
Foreign policy is no longer a field from which the AKP government was reaping sympathy beyond its own constituency. The AKP is now having problems convincing its own constituency of the validity of its foreign policy, and an important segment of this finds it unsuccessful.
No doubt, the major cause of this decline is AKP‘s extreme and interventionist policy in Syria that aims to topple the Baath regime.
The more the flaws emerge of this wrong policy that far exceeds Turkey's military, political and intellectual capacities, more the support for it wanes, and that in turn further widens the capacity deficit.
