Written by Jacob Okumu

A protesters throws back a tear gas canister at police during 2024 protests (AP Photo/ Andrew Kasuku)

June 2025 marks one year since Kenya found itself at a historic crossroads. Young people, forming the majority of the population, fuelled by frustration and yearning for dignity, poured into the streets in the hundreds of thousands in major towns and cities across the country. They protested as an expression of their dissatisfaction with the government led by President Ruto.

What started as cries against the draconian Finance Bill 2024 that threatened to increase and introduce more taxes onto the already overburdened citizens, quickly  metamorphosed into a vote of no confidence on the government, with the majority of the youthful protesters calling for the President to resign.

The rallies were defiant, hopeful, and deeply patriotic. But they were also tragic. Over 60 lives were lost, among them a 12-year-old child whose only crime was dreaming of a better future. More than 600 others were left nursing wounds inflicted by the very state that swore to protect them.

Today, as the dust of those momentous days settles, Kenyans are asking: was it worth it? What did we gain, and how have we sustained those gains in the face of continued repression?

The gains: a Nation awakened

For many, the protests were a painful but necessary awakening. The Finance Bill was eventually watered down, with some of its most draconian provisions scrapped in response to public pressure. But perhaps the deeper victory lay not in the fine print of legislation, but in the spirit of resistance that was born.

Ordinary Kenyans discovered their collective power. The protests stitched together a sense of shared destiny across tribe, class, and region. For the first time in years, young people felt they could confront the state not as passive subjects but as active citizens.

One year later, this culture of vigilance has not waned. Social accountability is at its peak. Citizens are more outspoken, more willing to protest, and less easily cowed by threats. The fire lit in June 2024 continues to burn.

The costs: blood, fear, and abductions

Despite the gains, the costs remain unbearable. The ghosts of the slain still haunt us. Families are left with empty chairs at dinner tables, parents with gaping wounds where their children once were. Activists whisper that the price paid in blood is too high, especially when justice remains elusive.

The government, rather than heeding the call for reform, has doubled down. Police killings persist, often with impunity. In a chilling turn, abduction has become a new weapon of silence. Activists vanish in the dead of night, only to resurface days later battered—or never to return at all. Fear stalks the movement, but fear has not killed it.

A culture of protest

If anything, repression has fertilized the soil of defiance. Regular protests now erupt over issues ranging from corruption scandals to skyrocketing food prices. What once felt exceptional has become almost routine: Kenyans on the streets, placards in hand, voices raised in unison.

This normalization of protest—what some call “protestism”—is reshaping civic life. More people, even those who once dismissed demonstrations as the work of radicals, now see protest as a legitimate and necessary tool of democracy. The youth, in particular, have embraced it as part of their identity, an inheritance they refuse to surrender.

At the grassroots level: picking up the pieces

At the grassroots level, where wounds are most raw, activists carry the heaviest burden. During the protest they the were the ones comforting bereaved families, organizing medical support for the injured, and rallying communities long after the cameras have left. One year after, they are the ones left to pick the pieces.

For them, the protests were not a moment but a movement, and sustaining it is backbreaking work. They speak of exhaustion, of the loneliness that comes when the headlines fade, of the surveillance and not to mention the pressure of continuing to pursue justice.

For them, the struggle persists, and still, they have to keep showing up. The resilience of grassroots activists is perhaps the truest testament to the sacrifices made last year.

Was it worth it?

So, was it worth it? The answer is complicated. No victory can justify the lives lost, the broken bodies, the tears of mothers burying their children. And yet, to dismiss those sacrifices as meaningless would be to dishonour the very patriots who stood tall.

The Finance Bill protests forced a reckoning. They reminded a generation of its power and forced those in authority to confront people unwilling to be silenced. One year later, Kenya is more vigilant, more restless, and more insistent on accountability.

The struggle is far from over. But perhaps that is the point: democracy is never a destination, but only a journey. The patriots of June 2024 showed us the way, in blood and in courage. It falls on us, the living, to ensure their sacrifice was not in vain.

Support gaps identified

• Psychological support often falls on communities. Professional support often requires funding. This is further burdening most impacted community members.
• Media support; when big movement moments pass, critical work is still happening. This work becomes more dangerous when awareness and attention are pulled away rapidly.
• Training offerings to further skill up organizers often require funding; this excludes grassroots activists who need this support most.
• Finding counter-surveillance methods is falling on communities. Communities need access to knowledge and funding to implement preventative/counter measures.

The post One year after the finance bill protests: was it worth it? appeared first on Blueprints for Change.

Anonymous author

Dr Umar Khalid, a young muslim man, has been in prison for 5 years, without trial. Each bail application has been rejected – all the way from the sessions court, to high courts to the supreme court.

His crime? He gave a speech upholding the Indian Constitution that guarantees every citizen of India their rights and freedoms. He fought against a discriminatory citizenship amendment bill, which caused widespread protests against the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) conservative regime. The Modi government accused Khalid of being a key conspirator in the 2020 Delhi riots that Modi’s party officials themselves have been openly seen inciting.

“We won’t respond to violence with violence. We won’t respond to hate with hate. If they spread hate, we will respond to it with love.” -Dr Umar Khalid

Umar Khalid’s case is not an anomaly. It is not a singular case of the failure of Indian judiciary or of gross misuse of terror laws. It is part of a long list of civil rights violations carried out by the Indian State apparatus against anyone that dares to oppose its economic and developmental policies.

Modi’s rise to power

Modi became a household name in 2014. Fronted by his political party, BJP, his political campaign was the first to use social media, PR agencies and corporate style advertisements to court voters. His campaign openly used the power of misinformation to twist historical facts to suit Hindutva Ideology, and to attack critics who dared to confront him. Authoritarianism thrives where there is ignorance.

A poor education system, a society that does not know or value its history, that is excessively obsessed with capitalist growth and development, a society that allows hate and bigotry to fester unchallenged, is a society that can be made to give up its rights and its freedoms.

Christophe Jafferlot, an expert on the rise of right-wing politics in India, classifies modern India as a system of electoral authoritarianism. Elections have not been suspended, but there is an exponential rise in authoritarianism. This is achieved by interfering with institutions in charge of organizing elections, making competition unequal in terms of financial resources, and restricting freedom of expression, including media independence.

As of 2025, India has reached a point where ALL of its democratic institutions – all the way from its judiciary, investigation bodies, central banks, enforcement directorates, elections commission, media and parliament have been captured.

Modi’s India now shares several similarities and patterns with Israel. This is most apparent in the rise in Israel-like tactics to subdue and subjugate minority groups. There is a chilling similarity between India’s use of bulldozers to demolish Muslim homes and businesses and Israel’s use of similar tactics to demolish Palestinian homes and properties.

India’s close friendship with Israel has resulted in arms deals that include spywares and other surveillance softwares – one of which, (Pegasus) has  been used to target Indian activists and journalists critical of the State.

A step back To pre-2014 India

This slide into authoritarianism and use of terror laws to subdue, intimidate and wrongfully imprison dissenters did not begin with Modi’s regime.

While it is true that the misuse and abuse of the UAPA (Unlawful Activities Prevention Act) – the primary terror law being used in India today – has been higher under the BJP government, it was under previous governments that these colonial legacy laws were formed, strengthened and allowed to continue.

The National investigation Agency (NIA) was formed in 2008 under the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government. The abuse of power and use of State violence against voices that oppose the State’s economic/development policies is not unique to the current regime.

Violence against marginalized communities, particularly Indigenous groups, had been normalized by successive governments. The UPA government designated these individuals as terrorists and/or people committing terrorist acts for interfering with economic development projects, which threaten natural resources and land rights of Indigenous Peoples.

In India today, the authoritarianism under Modi and BJP is a logical conclusion to the path chosen by successive governments and its people. In failing to chart its own unique path – one that could have put ecological conservation and human rights at the center – and following in the footsteps of the western models of capitalist, imperialistic development instead – India and its people have made a grave mistake.

Impacts on civil society groups/NGOs/grassroots Groups

Specific examples of attacks on activists, and their charges, include:

• Newsclick, a media house critical of the government, offices were raided in 2023 and a number of journalists were interrogated and falsely charged with ‘receiving money to run pro-China propaganda’.
• Teesta Satalvad, secretary of the human rights organization ‘Citizens for Justice and Peace’, was arrested in 2022 under fraudulent charges. Satalvad has been demanding justice for the 2002 Gujarat riots victims and has been seeking prosecution of senior government officials.
• Safoora Zargar was framed on charges of “anti-national” activities, conspiring to overthrow the government. She was arrested in 2021 and thrown in prison while she was still pregnant. It was only after pressure from International humanitarian groups that she was granted bail.
• Disha Ravi – the co convenor of Fridays For Future – India Chapter was arrested under sedition law during the farmers movement of 2020.
• In 2019, the websites of three environmental youth based collectives were suspended for launching a nationwide campaign against the central government’s attempts to dilute one of the environmental regulatory provisions of India.

Role of support organizations (NGOs/funders)

Support organizations must develop a strong understanding of the political landscape of the region and communities where support is targeted. Without such an understanding, the flow of resources easily becomes diverted and diffused into campaigns that have little bearing on the real-life experiences of those living under unjust systems.

In an authoritarian environment, the role of support organizations becomes crucial. Ensuring that support organizations do not back down and withdraw resources because the environment is challenging is of the utmost importance.

India today requires support to set up awareness amongst its people, particularly its youth. Groups that are setting up alternative education curriculums, workshops, conducting trainings to generate political literacy amongst young voters, are severely under supported. Citizen groups that conduct research, data collection, and investigative reporting need funds and resources.

Independent media is critical in a democracy – and that has collapsed entirely in India. The few that remain are being targeted, jailed and harassed. Independent journalism is another area that can benefit immensely with financial support. Think tanks, policy advocacy organizations need to be restored. Environmental and human rights groups need resources so they can continue to fight, campaign, generate awareness, and pursue legal avenues of justice.

Grassroots activists need support systems so they are protected and do not have to face the brunt of state violence alone. Legal and monetary support are crucial to grassroots groups that are fighting along the frontlines and are the primary targets of state sponsored violence.

Suggested reflective questions

• What similarities can you identify between your region and India pre-2014? Are there similarities to present day India?
• What, if any, democratic institutions in your region been captured by the state (judiciary, investigation bodies, central banks, enforcement directorates, elections commission, media and parliament)?
• What tactics from other repressive regions is your region also using to target marginalized groups and/or activists?
• How are marginalized groups (Indigenous, disabled, trans, impoverished etc.) treated in your region when they exist or resist?
• What key area is your group/organization aiming to address to resist authoritarianism (alternative education, research, independent media, legal aid, physical safety aid, direct action)?
• What could solidarity with activists in India look like for your organization/group?

The post The rise of authoritarianism in India & impacts on NGOs/grassroots groups appeared first on Blueprints for Change.

Written by: Keira Diaz

It started with food.

When thousands of Indonesians poured into the streets outside parliament, activists across Asia were already watching. From Manila, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, and beyond, they pulled out their phones, opened Grab, and started ordering food to the protest sites in Jakarta. Noodle soup. Rice meals. Whatever was available.

There was no central committee that decided this. No formal coalition that issued a directive. People saw other people standing in the heat and they fed them. That moment was small in the way that most honest things are small. It was also a window into something much larger that has been building across Asia for years.

A generation is confronting the same walls from different sides. Since 2020, young people have shown up in nearly every major wave of mass protest across Asia; Thailand, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Indonesia, Cambodia, Hong Kong. The names change and the shape of the movement keeps repeating.

Young people are the first to mobilize, the most willing to stay in the streets when repression escalates, and often the ones who absorb the worst of what governments decide to do in response. They are also the ones least represented in the rooms where decisions about their lives actually get made. This is exactly the condition these movements are growing out of.

What unites them has nothing to do with shared ideology or organized platforms. It is a set of shared experiences that keep producing the same rage in different countries. Corruption that everyone can see and nobody in power will address. Political dynasties rotating the same families through positions of authority across decades. Governments built to serve the people in their constitutions, and serving elites in practice.

Different triggers, same experiences

In Thailand, students took to the streets demanding constitutional reform and accountability from a military that has treated governance as its inheritance. In Bangladesh, young people rose against a quota system that protected the children of political loyalists at the expense of everyone else. What began as a student protest became something that shook an entire government.

In Myanmar, the military simply took power and shot people who objected. In Indonesia, the protests that drew the world’s attention were rooted in years of watching oligarchic networks tighten their grip on every institution that was supposed to push back. In Cambodia, the ruling party has been in power for four decades, and an entire generation has grown up never having known anything else.

And in the Philippines, it was floodwater. When Typhoon Carina hit and Metro Manila drowned while billions in flood control funds had quietly disappeared into contracts that built nothing, young Filipinos went online, traced the money, named names, and what started as outrage over infrastructure became a reckoning with a political class that had been stealing from the public for so long it had stopped trying to hide it.

Different countries, different histories, different immediate triggers. The people in the streets are angry about versions of the same thing.

A closer look at Nepal

Nepal is worth sitting with separately because it went further than anywhere else in the region, and still left the core question unanswered. A trend called NepoKids had been circulating on TikTok and Reddit for months before anything broke open.

Young Nepalis were posting side by side comparisons of politicians’ children living lavishly on social media while youth unemployment sat above 20% and the country quietly exported its young people abroad because there was nothing for them at home. When the government blocked 26 platforms in September 2025, students in school uniforms walked to the federal parliament expecting a rally.

The state opened fire. By the end of the month, at least 75 people were dead, forensic reports showing nearly every gunshot victim was struck in the head, neck, or chest. The parliament burned. The prime minister resigned. Protesters then ran an online poll to pick an interim leader and voted in Sushila Karki, who became Nepal’s first female prime minister. A government fell and a replacement was chosen through a Discord vote.

Nepal is now the third South Asian government in the 2020s brought down by young people, after Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. Both of those are still waiting. Bangladesh’s interim government has seen arbitrary arrests and press freedom violations. Sri Lanka’s new leadership has not rolled back the laws that made the uprising necessary. Nepal’s newly elected government inherited both the wreckage and the expectation, and the generation that burned the parliament is watching to see whether any of it lands anywhere real.

The 1% vs everyone else

The elite versus everyone else. That is the thread running through nearly all of it.

These movements are also, almost uniformly, decentralized and spontaneous in ways that both give them strength and leave them vulnerable. There is no central leadership to arrest, no single organization to dismantle, no unified platform a government can pressure into silence.

When protests spread, they spread because people share what they are seeing in real time, because someone posts a video and someone else shares it and within hours, people who had no prior connection are organizing around the same moment.

This makes movements fast. It also makes them uneven. Information during a protest is sporadic, emotional, and travels before it can be verified. Governments and well-resourced political actors have learned to exploit this, seeding disinformation into protest spaces, muddying the narratives of these organic movements. 

The question of violence also sits at the center of all of this in ways that rarely get honestly discussed. Most of these movements begin peacefully. Young people are the ones holding that line, often under enormous pressure, because they understand that the moment violence enters from their side, governments gain permission to escalate. But the state’s monopoly on violence is real and it gets used.

In Myanmar it has meant live ammunition. In Thailand it has meant legal persecution and the weaponization of courts. In Indonesia it has meant batons and water cannons and the slow grind of criminalization. Movements that began with students holding signs end up having to reckon with what happens when the state decides it has had enough of being embarrassed in public.

The militarization of protest response is a regional pattern. Governments across Asia have been learning from each other how to pacify resistance while maintaining the appearance of stability.

What is different now?

There are also fault-lines within the region that complicate any easy narrative of unified youth resistance. The Rohingya situation sits painfully at the edges of regional solidarity. In Malaysia, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Thailand, Rohingya people face discrimination from states, and sometimes from the same communities that march for democracy at home.

The movements calling for justice in their own countries have not always extended that call to people who arrive at their shores without papers and without protection. Young activists across the region are starting to name this contradiction, even when it is uncomfortable.

Young people are anxious. They are entering a world where economic instability is the baseline, where unemployment and rising costs and contracting opportunities are answered by a political class that has no intention of doing anything. Corruption, inequality, elite capture of institutions, these have existed in various forms for generations.

What is different now is proximity. When you wake up and open your phone and the first things you see are evidence of exactly the failures you already knew about, political reality stops being something you encounter occasionally and becomes something you move through all day. Political awakening for this generation is an accumulation of daily exposures that eventually tips into something that cannot be walked back.

And yet these movements remain volatile and vulnerable. The same spontaneity that makes them powerful makes them hard to sustain. Without structures that can hold people together between moments of crisis, movements flare and recede. Governments know this and sometimes simply wait. In relatively open societies there are pathways toward policy engagement and civic organizing that sustain participation over time.

In more repressive environments the options narrow considerably, pushing organizing underground or into diaspora networks or into the quieter forms of resistance that do not draw immediate attention. What works in Jakarta does not automatically work in Naypyidaw.

What comes after?

What is largely missing from the table is a real alternative. The movements across Asia have been clear about what they are against. Oligarchy, dynastic politics, corruption, military impunity, governments that treat public resources as personal property. What remains underdeveloped, and this is an honest description rather than a criticism, is any coherent picture of what comes after.

Anti-elite sentiment is widespread but it has not yet cohered into a politics that can name a different economic arrangement and organize around it. That space is dangerous. Populism rushes in to fill it, and leaders who speak the language of the streets while practicing the politics of the elites are a recurring feature of Asian political history, and the conditions right now are ones that keep producing them.

The flow of information within these movements matters more than most outside observers acknowledge. How people inside a protest understand what is happening, who is framing events, which narratives stick and which get lost; these shape what a movement becomes and what it is remembered as.

Young people building platforms for horizontal communication, sharing what is actually happening on the ground rather than waiting for media that may arrive late or arrive sympathetic to power, are doing something with real political consequence. The conversation infrastructure is an integral part of the struggle.

Where does this go? Nobody can answer that cleanly, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. What is clear now is that young people across Asia are building forms of participation in the space between what exists and what should exist, under surveillance and legal pressure and sometimes direct physical danger, in countries whose governments have been studying how to suppress them.

The protests have already destabilized arrangements that looked stable. They have already produced moments that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. They have also, in several cases, been absorbed or crushed without producing the structural change they were demanding. That tension, between the energy these movements generate and the structures that contain or outlast them, sits at the center of youth activism in Asia right now.

What effective activism looks like

Part of what needs rethinking is what activism looks like. The march, the rally, the press statement, these still matter. However they are also no longer sufficient on their own.

The Milk Tea Alliance for example, a transnational solidarity platform across Asia, did not begin as an organization with a strategic plan. It began as a hashtag and became a living regional network that has now continued coordinating campaigns for Myanmar, amplifying crackdowns in real time, and connecting activists across borders who would otherwise have no way to find each other.

Building movements through digital infrastructure, through shared narrative and horizontal coordination rather than vertical hierarchy, holds up under repression in ways that centralized structures often do not. The question is how to deepen it, how to move from coordination to sustained collective power without recreating the same centralized structures that make movements easy to target and dismantle.

Activists and researchers who have been watching these movements closely point to several lessons that keep surfacing. Movements combining online mobilization with offline community roots last longer than those living entirely in either space. Humour, creativity, and cultural expression keep people in struggle through the long periods when nothing seems to be moving.

Decentralized structures survive repression better but require deliberate investment in communication and trust to hold together over time. And solidarity that never becomes material, that never translates into shared resources, protection networks, and concrete mutual aid, tends to fade when the immediate crisis fades with it.

Impact of US foreign funding cuts

These lessons matter more now because the landscape movements have depended on is breaking down. When the Trump administration shut down US foreign funding agencies, NGOs closed and programs ended, and the impact traveled down the chain to very local, very grassroots organizations that had been receiving support from those NGOs.

Organizations doing legal aid, documentation, community organizing, safe spaces for activists facing persecution; the civil society funding architecture that many movements across Asia had come to rely on, imperfect as it was, has contracted sharply.

What fills that space is not yet clear. What is clear is that movements and grassroots organizers cannot afford to wait for it to be rebuilt from the outside. Building alternative funding models, community-based resources, and regional solidarity funds that flow horizontally between movements rather than vertically from institutional donors, is not a peripheral concern. This now becomes a question of survival for civil society.

The major central questions 

The food sent from Manila to Jakarta was a small thing. It was also honest. Someone saw people in the street and decided to feed them. That impulse, to act across distance on behalf of people you may never meet because their situation and yours are connected, is where regional solidarity actually lives, in choices made in ordinary moments when no one is watching. But impulse alone does not build movements that last. Impulse is where it starts. Structure is what carries it forward.

Two questions sit at the center of everything else and neither has been answered yet. The first is about narrative. Across Asia, from Bangkok to Dhaka to Jakarta to Manila, young people are rising against versions of the same thing. But these struggles have not yet found a common story that travels across borders the way the problems do.

How do we build a narrative, regional first, and if we dare global, that weaves these different but same calls into something that people in different countries can recognize themselves inside? How do we build the platform that carries it?

The second question is harder. How do we turn this organic movement energy into something with a robust political program, something capable of effecting actual structural change rather than pressuring systems that are very good at absorbing pressure and continuing unchanged?

Spontaneity gets people into the streets. It does not, on its own, rewrite constitutions, redistribute wealth and power, or dismantle the oligarchic networks that have spent decades learning how to survive popular anger.

Meeting the momentum

The movements that have produced durable structural change historically are the ones that found ways to connect mass energy to political program, to translate the rage in the streets into demands specific enough to fight for and win.

It has been months since the peak of the Gen Z protests in Asia, but this does not mean that the momentum has died down already. Young people across Asia are already doing the hardest part. They are showing up, repeatedly, at considerable personal cost, in countries that have made showing up dangerous.

The more urgent question now is whether the movements around them can build what is needed to meet that energy, the narrative infrastructure, the alternative funding models, the political programs, the regional solidarity that goes beyond hashtags into something that actually shares the cost of resistance. That work is less visible than a protest and harder to photograph. It is also where the next chapter gets written.

Support gaps identified

• Young people need more decision making opportunities. Meeting this need might look like including youth positions on boards, or paying youth for their input on strategic decisions.
• Horizontal conversation infrastructure; supporting existing communication that is happening, and helping to make further opportunities happen.
• Funding for things like navigating physical safety risks, or holding secure conversations and convenings. Long term, support to build alternative funding models is needed.
• Support to build protection networks and long-term mutual aid structures.
• Narrative weaving support to combine narratives across countries.

The post Gen Z protests in Asia: where do we go from here? appeared first on Blueprints for Change.

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.

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