By Can Öztaş
Each time political appointments in diplomacy are criticised in Turkey, the same defence appears with the reliability of a reflex: “Other countries do it too”.
Perhaps they do. But mediocrity does not become wisdom once imported.
The real question is not whether political appointments exist elsewhere. It is whether the Turkish Foreign Ministry can absorb them without damage. In my view, it cannot. The problem is not simply that some ambassadorial posts are given to people from outside the profession. The deeper problem is that favor, proximity, and personal trust have begun to reorganise the institution itself.
What is at stake is state capacity.
This matters all the more because Turkey now has one of the world’s largest diplomatic networks, with more than 250 missions abroad. A large network is not the same thing as a strong diplomatic service. You can multiply buildings more quickly than judgement. You can expand representation faster than you can build professional depth. According to an article in the Oksijen weekly newspaper, around 16% of Turkey’s ambassadors abroad are not career diplomats. In the Middle East, the ratio rises to 77%. This is no longer an occasional exception. It is a pattern.
SHIFTING LOGIC
The familiar reply is that political appointments are normal in democracies. Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan has argued in parliament that merit still matters and outside appointments fall within political discretion.
This misses the point. The issue is not whether a few career officials still receive promotion. It is that the institutional logic has shifted. Merit is praised in principle; proximity prevails in practice. And when the same ministry that speaks most insistently of professionalism also advances trusted entourages and fast-tracked loyalties, merit begins to sound less like a standard than a sermon addressed to those expected to wait.
WHY AMBASSADORS MATTER
A foreign ministry is not an ordinary bureaucracy. It depends on long formation, apprenticeship, languages, memory, judgement, restraint, and the difficult craft of representing a state abroad while understanding both its interests and its limits. In Turkey, this matters even more because the ministry remains heavily ambassador-centred. If the person at the top of a mission lacks diplomatic depth, professional instinct, or cultural and linguistic competence, the weakness does not remain personal. It spreads.
Institutions teach, even in decay. What this system teaches is painfully clear: apprenticeship matters less than access, patience less than proximity, and some must endure exhausting filters while others arrive by express lift. Retired Ambassador Hasan Göğüş once described how career diplomats now face as many as seven separate examinations on the way to ambassadorial rank, producing what he called a new “Army of the Disenchanted.” That phrase deserves attention.
Once such a lesson is absorbed, the institution changes from within. People lower their heads. They avoid initiative. They become less candid, less invested, and less willing to expose themselves to risk. Mistakes by politically protected figures appear survivable; errors by professionals are more quickly noticed and more sharply punished. In time, the ministry grows quieter, more cautious, and less intelligent. The loss is not only moral. It is functional. Reporting becomes thinner. Correction from below becomes rarer. Representation becomes weaker.
The damage deepens when political appointments move beyond ambassadorial posts and into personnel, logistics, legal affairs, and information security. Reporting in the Turkish press has repeatedly noted how political appointees occupy institutional space while career ambassadors accumulate in Ankara awaiting assignment. That is more than unfair. It is a message. The institution is being told what now counts.
When nepotism enters the ministry’s administrative core, it is no longer a matter of a few contested names. It becomes a governing style.
A foreign ministry can survive the occasional bad appointment. What it cannot survive is a system that tells its professionals one thing and teaches them another. The state thinks in decades. Patronage thinks in appointments. No serious state can afford to confuse the two.
