Turkish elections have put the Grain Corridor on hold

After 100% of the ballots in the Turkish presidential election have been counted, the current head of state, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was announced to have 49.24% of the votes. His main rival, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, has 45.06%.

Presidential election in Turkey, May 14, 2023: results

The future of the Grain Corridor largely depends on the election results. Andrii Klymenko, head of the Black Sea Institute of Strategic Studies, emphasized that the Grain Corridor had in fact stopped working before May 14. If Erdoğan gets elected, Turkey is likely to demand that it resume its work after a while. However, should Kılıçdaroğlu win, the initiative would be frozen at least until the new government is formed.

"We advise building the export policy with these uncertainties taken into account," the expert summarizes.

The schedule of the Grain Corridor

Context. On May 11, negotiations on the functioning of the Grain Deal between Turkey, Russia, Ukraine, and the UN finished in Istanbul.

"The UN and Turkey have an understanding that the Grain Initiative is crucial for global food security and has to function consistently. Therefore, further consultations to unblock the initiative will be held online, as they proposed," said Oleksandr Kubrakov, Deputy Prime Minister for Restoration of Ukraine.

Meanwhile, the Russian foreign ministry threatened that the Grain Deal would cease to exist if Russia wasn’t guaranteed by May 18 that its demands would be met, including on the transit of ammonia through Ukrainian territory.