Dimitar Bechev

Not sure if this is a total victory for Erdoğan. Opposition voters are even more consolidated ("CHP in-fighting" narrative aside). Kılıçdaroğlu is entirely discredited. AKP admits it cannot win power by means other that clamping down on competitors. This will blow up one day.

CHP is more popular than AKP. It would trounce AKP in a fair election. Erdoğan jailed CHP’s presidential candidate. And now he’s replacing its leader with a weaker, worn-out, unpopular politician. The goal is to turn CHP into a loyal and easily beatable opposition.

Big group of riot police enters the hq of Turkey’s main opposition party in Ankara. They’re helping oust the party leadership after a court annulled the congress that elected them and appoint Kilicdaroglu, who has never won a single national election.

Since Ukraine began to increase attacks on Russian oil refineries, Russia has been looking for an excuse to carry out an indiscriminate missile strike on central Kyiv - even before Putin’s little Red Square parade, so the warning of a potential Oreshnik strike is not surprising.

Freshly baked Caucasus ‘experts’ act like pre-Pashinyan Armenia was some Russian colony. But under Sargsyan, Armenia had good relations with the US, EU, Iran — and even started détente with Turkey. Domestically? Corrupt disaster, yes. But foreign policy was sane. Just facts.

After today's mass rally in Belgrade, which came after a certain pause, I would venture several educated guesses: 1. The Vučić regime does not have the majority in Serbian society. Vučić will postpone the elections as much as the law allows. 2. The anti-Maidan hooligan camp in the city center will be the last bastion to be overcome after the electoral victory. It's not realistic that Vučić will leave power in an orderly fashion like Đukanović or Orban. 3. Changes that will follow the fall of the regime will not be ideological but structural. Serbian foreign policy will remain unchanged, but the regime's clientelistic system both in the country and in the Western Balkans will crash. 4. In the years that will follow, there will be no single dominant party like in Hungary. What will ensue will be the struggle among several populist right-wing political organizations vying to take the lost position of the Vučić regime.