Battered by terrorist attacks, its economy slowing perilously, and with the army fighting in Syria, Turkey is nonetheless consumed by the campaign to change the constitution and give President Recep Tayyip Erdogan a Vladimir Putin-style presidency.
Not everyone, even among Mr Erdogan’s base, is sure he will win the referendum in April, despite his stranglehold on power and the media. The neo-Islamist government is therefore wheeling out an array of gimmicks to get Turkey’s limping economy to the political finishing line.
Yet beyond this fraught and present drama lie big questions about the future of Turkey, a Nato ally and EU candidate that has long since ceased to be a linchpin of stability for a Middle East in meltdown, or a partner on which western powers feel instinctively they can rely.
Turkey’s strategic direction is in play. Mr Erdogan is determined to sever the slender institutional restraints on exercising his accumulated power. Yet this towering figure is trapped between President Putin and President Donald Trump, however much he admires both as soulmate strongmen.
Relations with the EU, which has no real plans to admit Turkey, are transactional. Brussels is trying to prevent Turkey drifting eastward by, for example, deepening the two decades-old customs union as a partial offset for a decade of frustrated entry negotiations. The supplicant tone of recent EU leaders’ visits to his palace, must make Mr Erdogan feel he has the better hand. He will, no doubt, keep up his belligerent rhetoric.
Many saw these tirades, which have included public musing on whether Turkey would do better inside the Eurasian Economic Union, a Putin project, or the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, rather than the EU and Nato, as tactical — to show that he had choices.
That is not so clear. Take Russia. Mr Erdogan, after mending his fences with Mr Putin in the wake of last July’s botched putsch in Turkey, wants to be close to the Kremlin. Only with a green light from Russia, whose air force turned the tide of Syria’s civil war, could the Turks stop Syrian Kurdish forces uniting their territories into a self-governing entity — linked to the rekindled Kurdish insurgency inside Turkey.
But Mr Putin’s view of Turkey would appear to be transactional too: useful for forming a new power tripod with Russia and Iran in Syria, and a potential pillar of the Eurasian axis.
Mr Erdogan recently brought into his inner circle one Dogu Perincek, leader of the minuscule Homeland party (it got 0.25 per cent of the vote in the 2015 general election). This former Maoist, who out-ultras Turkey’s ultranationalists, is said to be leading purges targeting the Islamist cult led by Fethullah Gulen, now resident in the US and blamed for the mutiny. The Perincek group, heavy on generals and securocrats, tilts towards Russia.
Mr Erdogan would also like to befriend Mr Trump, whose election he and his media greeted with fanfare. Their expectations look unreal. He wants the US to extradite Mr Gulen. But he may have noticed that American courts are less biddable than the Turkish judiciary. If the Trump White House bans the Muslim Brotherhood, which Mr Erdogan has championed, that will be hard to shrug off.
All important is whether Washington keeps backing Syrian Kurd fighters in the campaign to liberate Raqqa from Isis. Turkey would probably need to pledge its army to the Raqqa fight to get Mr Trump to switch horses. But Turkish forces are still bogged down to the west. As one student of strategy in Istanbul puts it: “If Turkey does not commit itself to Raqqa, how can it credibly attack the US for backing the [Syrian] Kurds”?
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