This month, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan intimated that his country might consider leaving NATO. Meanwhile, on a visit to Moscow last week, Turkey’s foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu referred to Russia as a “strategic partner”—a first. This talk is empty. Erdogan may well be angry at Washington, but ultimately, Ankara is going to have to do whatever it takes to restore its ties with the West. Doing so might not be enough to pull the country out of its economic crisis, but Erdogan has few other options if he wants to avoid a potentially worse political meltdown: He depends too deeply on forces in the Turkish state that will have difficulty stomaching a permanent shift away from the United States and toward Russia.

In mid-August, U.S. President Donald Trump said that Turkey has been a “problem for a long time.” And that is true. But, at least in part, that’s because the United States has also been a problem for Turkey. Washington’s current list of grievances against Ankara include its detention of the American pastor Andrew Brunson, its opposition to U.S. attempts to empower the Kurds in Syria, and its deepening relationship with Russia, from which Turkey has agreed to purchase four batteries of S-400 air defense missiles by 2019. Yet from Turkey’s perspective, all of these actions seem reasonable.

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On Sunday, Recep Tayyip Erdogan won a second term as president of Turkey. He secured more than 50 percent of the vote, avoiding the need for a runoff. His Justice and Development Party (AKP) lost ground in the parliamentary election, but Erdogan will keep his majority in parliament thanks to a strong showing by his allies, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). Muharrem Ince, the leading opposition contender and the candidate of the social democratic Republican People’s Party (CHP), received over 30 percent of the vote. That represents the best result for a social democrat in Turkey in over 40 years. After the official Anadolu news agency announced the results, Ince said that the election had not been fair but that he accepted that Erdogan had won.

Even though Erdogan secured enough votes to avoid a second round, the campaign has revealed Turkey’s future leaders. For the first time since he came to power 15 years ago, as prime minister, Erdogan has had to cope with challengers who represent rising societal trends: social democracy and the nationalist right. As well as Ince’s challenge from the left, Erdogan faced Meral Aksener, the leader of the right-wing nationalist Good Party. Aksener should have been in a better position than Ince, since two-thirds of Turks identify as pious, nationalist, and conservative, and less than one-third identifies as of the left, as social democrats, or as socialists. But a change may be in the making.

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