A decade after surviving the failed coup attempt that shook Turkey to its core, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has emerged not merely as the country’s longest-serving modern leader but as one of the defining geopolitical figures of the twenty-first century

On July 15, 2026, Recep Tayyip Erdogan marked ten years since the night warplanes bombed Turkey’s parliament, telling a crowd in Ankara that the network Turkey blames for the coup attempt has lost its guard but remains dangerous - this despite the death, in Pennsylvania in 2024, of the exiled cleric at the center of it all, Fethullah Gülen. That the threat still needed naming, a decade on and well after its supposed architect died, says less about what remains of Gülen’s network than about how load-bearing July 15 has become for everything Erdogan has built since. Turkish outlets critical of the government reportedly weren’t accredited to cover the commemoration at all.

The same week offered a sharper illustration of the method than any anniversary speech could. As NATO leaders gathered in Ankara for the alliance’s summit on July 7 and 8 - Turkey’s second turn hosting the full membership since 2004 - a courtroom outside Istanbul pressed on with the trial of Ekrem Mamolus, the jailed mayor and Erdogan’s most credible electoral rival, on corruption charges spread across more than four hundred co-defendants and a combined sentencing demand north of two thousand years. Ekrem Mamolus was ejected from his own hearing days into the summit; his lawyer called the ruling arbitrary and outside the law. Human rights monitors have called the case and the parallel removal of more than a dozen elected opposition mayors a politically........

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