Insight from the Frontlines: Türkiye

Written by: Anonymous author

 

The end of uncertainty, not the end of politics

For more than a decade, Türkiye has been widely described by political scientists as a “competitive authoritarian” regime: a system where elections still matter, opposition parties still compete, and democratic institutions formally continue to exist. However, the ruling bloc systematically tilts the political playing field through control over the judiciary, media, state resources, and coercive institutions.

What has unfolded in Türkiye since the 2023 general elections increasingly suggests that the country is moving beyond competitive authoritarianism toward a more consolidated and openly managed form of authoritarian rule, one in which elections may continue to exist formally, but where the possibility of genuine power alternation is being structurally narrowed.

This authoritarian consolidation is not taking place from a position of overwhelming social legitimacy. Quite the opposite. At the exact moment when the ruling bloc appears institutionally strongest, it also appears politically weaker than at any point in the last twenty years.

Public opinion polling throughout 2024, 2025, and 2026 suggested that the Justice and Development Party (AKP) was no longer Türkiye’s leading political force. The Republican People’s Party (CHP), after years of internal stagnation and electoral frustration, emerged as the country’s first party following the 2024 local elections. Opposition support stabilized around a broad but fragmented social majority that increasingly rejected Erdoğan and his government.

This contradiction defines contemporary Türkiye. The regime is becoming more authoritarian precisely because electoral competition has become more dangerous for the regime itself.

The political trajectory from the opposition’s devastating defeat in the 2023 general elections to the judicial intervention against the CHP leadership in May 2026 reveals not merely a cycle of repression, but the gradual transformation of the Turkish political system itself.

 

The 2023 opposition defeat and the crisis of legitimacy inside CHP

The 2023 presidential and parliamentary elections represented a profound psychological and political rupture for Türkiye’s opposition.

Despite an unprecedented economic crisis, soaring inflation, institutional decay, and the aftermath of the February 2023 earthquakes, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan secured reelection. The opposition alliance, organized around Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu’s candidacy, failed to translate widespread social dissatisfaction into electoral victory. The defeat produced a deep legitimacy crisis inside the CHP.

For years, critics inside and outside the party had argued that the CHP leadership under Kılıçdaroğlu lacked organizational dynamism, political aggression, and emotional resonance with broader segments of society. Although Kılıçdaroğlu succeeded in building a remarkably broad anti-Erdoğan coalition, the inability to win the election despite severe economic conditions intensified demands for generational and strategic transformation.

The emergence of the “değişim” (“change”) movement after the election was therefore not simply an internal leadership contest. It became a broader argument about whether the opposition could remain electorally competitive under increasingly authoritarian conditions. At the center of this process stood Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu.

İmamoğlu’s repeated electoral victories in İstanbul, especially his ability to mobilize broad coalitions extending beyond traditional CHP voters, gave him symbolic significance far beyond municipal politics. His support for Özgür Özel during the CHP’s 38th Ordinary Congress in November 2023 fundamentally reshaped the party’s internal balance of power.

Özgür Özel’s victory over Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu was not merely a leadership transition. It represented the first successful internal challenge to the old CHP hierarchy in decades. For many opposition voters, the congress symbolized renewal.

For the ruling bloc, however, it likely signaled something else: the emergence of a potentially more electorally effective opposition.

 

The 2024 local elections: the return of electoral competition

The March 2024 local elections transformed the Turkish political landscape. For the first time since 1977, the CHP emerged as the first party nationwide in local vote share. The party retained major metropolitan municipalities such as İstanbul and Ankara while expanding its reach into traditionally conservative regions.

These results carried significance beyond municipal administration. The elections demonstrated several important realities simultaneously:

• Erdoğan remained politically influential but no longer electorally invincible.
• Economic deterioration was eroding the AKP’s urban support base.
• Opposition voters, despite the trauma of 2023, had not disengaged from politics.
• The CHP under new leadership could mobilize strategic voting coalitions more effectively than before.

Most importantly, the elections suggested that the possibility of democratic alternation, however difficult, still existed.

This mattered because competitive authoritarian systems survive partly by maintaining controlled uncertainty. Elections must appear meaningful enough to preserve legitimacy, but not threatening enough to risk actual regime displacement. The 2024 local elections disrupted this balance.

As the CHP consolidated itself as Türkiye’s leading electoral force in polling throughout late 2024 and early 2025, the regime increasingly faced a structural dilemma: How could electoral competition continue if the opposition was becoming capable of winning nationally?

 

The institutional counter-offense

Following the local elections, pressure on opposition municipalities intensified. Investigations targeting CHP-run municipalities expanded. Legal and administrative interventions against mayors accelerated. Opposition figures increasingly faced corruption allegations, judicial proceedings, media campaigns, and institutional obstruction.

The Turkish government consistently framed these processes as ordinary judicial procedures carried out independently by prosecutors and courts. Opposition parties and many International observers, however, argued that the investigations reflected a broader pattern of selective judicial pressure against political challengers. This distinction is politically crucial.

Modern authoritarian systems rarely abolish legal institutions outright. Instead, they often govern through law, selectively applied, strategically activated, and politically consequential. In Türkiye, this pattern had already emerged in earlier years through interventions against Kurdish political actors, journalists, civil society organizations, academics, and independent media.

What changed after 2024 was the scale and centrality of the pressure directed at the country’s main opposition party. The target was no longer peripheral dissent. The target increasingly became the possibility of electoral transfer of power itself.

 

March 19, 2025: the arrest of Ekrem İmamoğlu

The detention and subsequent arrest of Ekrem İmamoğlu on March 19, 2025 marked a decisive turning point. The timing of the operation carried unavoidable political implications. İmamoğlu had increasingly emerged as Erdoğan’s strongest potential electoral challenger. Multiple polls suggested he could outperform Erdoğan in a presidential race. Just days before the CHP was expected to formalize his presidential candidacy process, authorities moved against him through an expansive judicial operation involving allegations including corruption and terrorism-related accusations.

The government rejected accusations of political motivation and insisted that the judiciary was acting independently. Nevertheless, the broader political perception inside Türkiye was profoundly different. For millions of opposition voters, İmamoğlu’s arrest confirmed the belief that electoral competition would no longer be allowed to proceed under ordinary democratic conditions once it posed a credible threat to incumbent power. Mass protests erupted across the country since then.

The demonstrations that followed were among the largest anti-government mobilizations in years. University students, young voters, blue collars, labor groups, and opposition supporters returned to the streets despite growing risks of detention and police intervention. Importantly, these protests revealed something politically significant: The opposition electorate in Türkiye remained socially alive. Years of repression, polarization, arrests, and institutional pressure had not fully destroyed the country’s democratic social energy.

The regime appeared increasingly capable of controlling institutions. But it appeared less capable of rebuilding broad societal consent.

 

The fragmented but persistent “60%”

One of the most misunderstood dynamics in contemporary Türkiye is the relationship between opposition fragmentation and opposition size. The opposition is deeply divided ideologically.

Secular nationalists, social democrats, Kurdish political actors, liberals, leftists, conservative dissidents, youth movements, feminists, and various urban middle-class constituencies often disagree profoundly on identity, nationalism, migration, secularism, or foreign policy. Yet despite these differences, a broad social majority increasingly appears united around one negative consensus: A growing rejection of Erdoğan’s model of governance.

This does not mean that Türkiye possesses a coherent democratic transition coalition. It does mean, however, that authoritarian consolidation is occurring despite visible erosion in hegemonic social support.

Polling trends throughout 2025 and 2026 suggested that nearly 60 percent of society remained politically distant from the governing bloc in one form or another. The problem for the opposition is not simply numerical weakness. It is organizational fragmentation, institutional asymmetry, and unequal access to state power. This distinction matters because authoritarian durability does not necessarily depend on majority popularity. It depends on the regime’s ability to fragment opponents, monopolize institutions, and increase the cost of collective political action.

 

From electoral competition to judicial management

The developments culminating in the judicial intervention against the CHP leadership in May 2026 represented an escalation beyond ordinary electoral authoritarianism. The legal efforts targeting the legitimacy of the CHP’s 38th Congress, the congress that brought Özgür Özel to power, carried implications extending beyond intra-party disputes.

By May 2026, Turkish courts had effectively moved toward removing the CHP leadership and reopening internal legitimacy disputes surrounding the opposition’s leadership transition. Critics inside the opposition described the process as an attempt to politically incapacitate the country’s main opposition force through judicial means. Government officials and pro-government commentators rejected these accusations and defended the process as lawful institutional oversight.

Regardless of legal interpretation, the political effect was unmistakable. The events of May 2026 further demonstrated that the crisis was no longer limited to courtrooms or electoral institutions. Following a police intervention at CHP headquarters in Ankara, where officers reportedly used tear gas inside and around the building during escalating tensions surrounding judicial proceedings against the party leadership, Özgür Özel left the headquarters alongside party members and supporters and marched toward the Turkish Grand National Assembly.

The mass gathering that followed at Egemenlik Park became one of the most symbolically important opposition mobilizations of the post-2023 period. Beyond the immediate confrontation itself, the moment revealed an increasingly important transformation inside the CHP: a party long criticized for institutional caution was beginning to reconnect with street politics, public mobilization, and emotional political language.

For many opposition voters, the image of the CHP leadership physically confronting state pressure in public space carried significance extending far beyond partisan loyalty. It reinforced the perception that the struggle in Türkiye was no longer simply an electoral contest, but a broader confrontation over the survival of democratic political participation itself.

The Turkish political system was increasingly shifting from competitive electoral management toward direct institutional management of opposition capacity itself. This distinction is critical. In competitive authoritarian systems, opposition parties may compete under unfair conditions.

In more consolidated authoritarian systems, the regime increasingly decides which opposition structures are allowed to remain politically functional. The May 2026 intervention signaled movement toward the latter model.

 

International context: Erdoğan, Trump, and geopolitical immunity

The International dimension of Türkiye’s authoritarian consolidation cannot be ignored. The return of Donald Trump to the White House fundamentally altered the geopolitical environment surrounding democratic backsliding globally.

For years, Erdoğan’s government had already benefited from a broader International reluctance to prioritize democratic standards over geopolitical cooperation. Türkiye’s strategic position within NATO, migration management agreements with Europe, regional military influence, and role in conflicts ranging from Syria to Ukraine provided Ankara with significant diplomatic leverage.

Under the renewed Trump administration, concerns regarding democratic erosion appeared increasingly subordinated to strategic and transactional considerations. The Erdoğan government seemed to interpret this geopolitical environment as providing greater room for domestic political intervention with reduced external costs. This does not necessarily imply direct coordination regarding specific judicial actions. However, it does reflect a broader reality:

Authoritarian governments frequently act more aggressively when they perceive declining International democratic pressure.

Public criticism from Western institutions regarding arrests, judicial interventions, and democratic deterioration in Türkiye increasingly appeared symbolic rather than consequential. Meanwhile, Erdoğan maintained strong working relationships with key International actors despite intensifying domestic repression allegations. This International permissiveness matters.

Authoritarian consolidation rarely occurs in complete isolation. It often advances within geopolitical environments where stability, migration control, security cooperation, and regional bargaining outweigh democratic accountability.

 

Why Türkiye is no longer simply “competitive authoritarian”?

Türkiye’s current trajectory increasingly challenges older analytical frameworks.

For years, the “competitive authoritarianism” model accurately described a system where elections remained uncertain enough to matter.

Today, however, several developments indicate movement toward a different phase:

• Major opposition figures face escalating judicial incapacitation.
• Opposition municipalities increasingly operate under administrative siege.
• The judiciary is perceived by large parts of society as politically aligned.
• Electoral competition remains formally present but substantively constrained.
• Institutional interventions increasingly target opposition organizational continuity itself.
• The cost of dissent continues to rise across media, academia, civil society, and politics.

Most importantly, the state increasingly appears unwilling to tolerate even the possibility of electoral uncertainty when opposition victory becomes plausible. This is the defining threshold. The issue is no longer whether elections occur. The issue is whether elections can realistically produce alternation of power.

 

Authoritarian consolidation without social hegemony

Türkiye today represents a paradoxical political landscape. The regime appears institutionally dominant yet socially insecure. The opposition appears socially large yet institutionally vulnerable.

The state has become increasingly centralized, personalized, and coercive. Yet the governing bloc simultaneously appears unable to rebuild the broad social consensus that characterized earlier periods of AKP rule.

This distinction will shape Türkiye’s future. Authoritarian systems are most stable when institutional control and social legitimacy reinforce one another.

In Türkiye, however, these two dimensions increasingly diverge. A large segment of society continues searching for political alternatives despite exhaustion, fragmentation, fear, and repression. The opposition remains disorganized, internally contradictory, and strategically inconsistent.

Yet it also remains electorally alive. That is precisely why institutional pressure has intensified.

The Turkish case offers a broader lesson about twenty-first century authoritarianism: Modern autocracies do not necessarily emerge because opposition disappears. Sometimes they emerge because opposition remains socially competitive for too long. And when electoral uncertainty becomes too dangerous, regimes increasingly attempt not merely to defeat opponents at the ballot box, but to structurally redesign the political arena itself. Türkiye may now be entering exactly such a phase.

But even under intensifying authoritarian consolidation, one political reality remains strikingly visible: The country’s democratic social base has not disappeared. It has only become fragmented, pressured, and institutionally constrained. Whether that fragmented majority can eventually transform itself into a durable democratic coalition remains the central political question of Türkiye’s coming decade.

 

Support gaps identified

• Grassroots groups lack the resources, relationships, or facilitation support needed to build durable alliances across different movements and communities.
• Many activists and organizations lack access to legal aid, digital security, emergency response systems, and sustainable organizational structures.
• Community-level and municipal organizing often lacks sustained funding and infrastructure.
• There are major gaps in leadership development, civic education, youth engagement, independent media support, and movement sustainability.
• External attention often does not translate into meaningful protection or structural change, leaving gaps in locally rooted support systems.
• Funding and programming often prioritize policy work over relationship-building, public solidarity, and collective care that sustain movements long term.