Key Erdoğan ally makes closer Russia, China ties condition for 2028 election support

10.04.2026

By Turkish Minute

Source:https://www.turkishminute.com/2026/04/10/key-erdogan-ally-makes-closer-russia-china-ties-condition-for-2028-election-support/

A senior official from the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), a key ally of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), said his party’s support for Erdoğan’s party in the 2028 elections will depend on acceptance of a program for closer cooperation with Russia and China, in an interview he gave during a visit to Moscow in March.

İlyas Topsakal, an MHP vice chair and lawmaker from the northern province of Samsun, said the party’s “unofficial condition” for staying in the alliance with the AKP was not ministerial positions but a plan for work with Moscow and Beijing, Turkish media said on Thursday, citing the March 23 interview in the Russian Vedemosti daily.

The remarks pointed to a harder Eurasian line from the MHP, the key partner providing Erdoğan’s party a parliamentary majority, at a time when Turkey follows a stronger pro-NATO policy after earlier tensions with the alliance members.

Topsakal said MHP leader Devlet Bahçeli had sent him to Moscow to explain the party’s call for a Turkey-Russia-China alignment to political parties, bureaucrats and intellectuals in Russia.

Bahçeli first publicly called for such an alignment in a written statement on September 18, 2025, when he said the best response to what he called a US-Israel “coalition of evil” was the construction of an alliance made up of Turkey, Russia and China.

The call for a Turkey–Russia–China axis marks a stark contrast to Turkey’s formal role as a NATO member and an ally of the United States.

Turkey joined NATO in 1952 and hosts key alliance assets, yet it has deepened ties with Russia on energy and defense and seeks growing trade and technology links with China.

Turkey bought Russia’s S-400 air defense system in 2019, which led to its removal from the US-led F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program and US sanctions under a law known as CAATSA.

Ankara and Moscow had backed opposing sides in conflicts from Libya to the Caucasus and the recent regime change in Syria, where Turkey supported the opposition and Russia the government of now-ousted President Bashar al-Assad, sparking anti-Turkey sentiment in Russia.

Turkey’s ties with China include trade, infrastructure and technology as well as political friction over the treatment of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, although Ankara has toned down its criticism in recent years and cracked down on pro-Uyghur protests.

The Vedomosti report said the MHP now wants closer contact with Eurasian bodies such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Collective Security Treaty Organization and the Commonwealth of Independent States, as well as coordination with the Organization of Turkic States.

The MHP, founded by former colonel Alparslan Türkeş in 1969, is a far-right nationalist party whose backing has been central to the survival of the ruling party’s grip on power since a failed coup in 2016.