Analysis
Smart, independent reporting on Turkey's politics, economy and foreign affairs.
The Defense Ministry’s budget, 623.9 billion lira in 2025, is set to increase 31.9% to 822.9 billion lira in 2026, according to figures released during parliamentary budget talks Nov. 26. This allocation does not cover Turkey’s latest procurement of Eurofighters.
Turkey will test the proposed “basic citizenship income” pilot program, first announced by the governing AKP in 2023.
Months of competition between Turkey and Australia has come to an end, as Turkey became next year’s host of the UN Climate Change Conference (COP31). Australia will chair the summit, while discussions will focus on the Pacific, according to the compromise reached on Nov. 19, hours before the end of this year's summit in Brazil.
Islamist YRP Chair Fatih Erbakan has promised to repeal Law 6284, the main legal safeguard protecting women from violence and the only remaining protection after Turkey withdrew from the landmark Istanbul Convention in 2021.
This marks the third attempt to persuade the PKK to lay down arms during the AKP’s 23-year rule.
In early November 2025, two gatherings revealed the evolving architecture of Eurasian energy and resource corridors: the “3+1” Energy Ministerial in Athens, bringing together Greece, Cyprus, Israel, and the United States, and the C5+1 Summit in Washington between the United States and the five Central Asian republics—Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan.
Selahattin Demirtaş has long been more than a defendant; he is a barometer of how politics manages law, another act in a long-running political drama in Turkey. This is not a scripted series that keeps millions guessing on Thursday nights; it is a real-world production about the country’s future.
In Turkey, çubuklu pijama, or striped pajamas, means much more than bedtime. It’s the uniform of the “baba”: the modest patriarch who comes home, trades his jacket for cotton stripes, and settles in front of the evening news. A garment of thrift and decency, it once stood for the steady comfort of the lower middle class.
Turkey’s Banking Regulation and Supervision Agency (BDDK) released new data covering the first nine months of 2025, revealing the country’s debt landscape by province. The capital, Ankara, recorded the highest total credit debt, while the central Anatolian province of Karaman had the largest share of citizens unable to repay their loans and facing collection proceedings.
The financial crisis facing companies in Turkey is deepening as the amount of non-performing loans from banks exceeded 519 billion lira as of the week of Oct. 24. In the January-October period of 2025, the number of companies granted a temporary moratorium on debt repayment rose to 2,326, a 72% increase year on year.
The Defense Ministry denied reports that Turkey cannot use the Eurofighter Typhoon fighter jets it will procure from the U.K. against Greece over the Aegean Sea.
In Turkish, casus is the spy who slips through keyholes and whispers down telephone lines. In Ottoman Turkish, the word appears as câsûs, borrowed from Arabic, and, under Sultan Abdülhamid II’s watchful reign, it had a cousin, hafiyye, the “secret investigator” who made surveillance an imperial art.