I am usually an optimist when it comes to Turkey’s future. Indeed, I wrote a whole book about The Rise of Turkey. But these days, I’m worried. The country faces a toxic combination of political polarization, government instability, economic slowdown, and threats of violence—from both inside and outside Turkey—that could soon add up to a catastrophe. The likelihood of that outcome is increasing amid Russia’s bombing raids in Syria in support of its ally, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, which threaten to debilitate the moderate rebels and boost the extremists in Syria’s civil war, while leaving Turkey to deal with two unruly neighbors: Assad and ISIS.

Of course, Turkey has gone through periods of political and economic crisis before. During the 1970s, the country’s economy collapsed, and the instability led to fighting among right- and left-wing militant groups and security forces that killed thousands of people. Then, in the 1990s, Turkey was pummeled by triple-digit inflation and a full-blown Kurdish insurgency that killed tens of thousands. Turkey survived both those decades. The historian in me says that Turkey will be able to withstand the coming shock this time as well.

But the analyst in me says that things look different this time.

For one thing, Turkey’s Kurdish problem has changed. Until this year, Turkey’s 10 to 12 million-strong Kurdish community, representing about 15 percent of the Turkish population, wasn’t a unified political force; its internal splits followed the fault lines of the country as a whole. Starting in the 1990s, nationalist Kurds tended to vote for parties sympathetic to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which Turkey and the United States consider a terrorist group, and which fought for decades for independence from the Turkish government. But those voters were not the whole of the Kurdish electorate. Since the 1960s, the left-leaning Alevi Kurds, who adhere to a liberal branch of Islam, have voted for the social-democratic Republican People’s Party, which is a secular, Turkish-nationalist movement. More importantly, conservative Kurds, who by my estimate represent nearly half of the Kurdish population, have tended to vote for the governing, pro-Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) ever since it was established by former prime minister, and current president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2001.

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