This piece was firstpublished in Turkey Recap on March 26, 2025.
The March 23 imprisonment of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu is a defining moment, even in a country that has become a global shorthand for autocratization. With the most popular rival of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan now in prison, the arrest of hundreds of others in investigations against the Republican People’s Party (CHP), and rumors circulating that the government may seek to even take over the party, Turkey is on the cusp of a transition to a consolidated dictatorship. This would mark a profound transformation in governance in Turkey. It would also have global implications for thinking about this next phase of the post-Cold War order, confirming that we have entered a new era in which hybrid forms of governance like “competitive authoritarianism” are replaced with more repressive models.
Turkey, in the last 15 years, is an exemplary case for understanding competitive authoritarianism. Political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way developed the concept in the early 2000s to describe a specific regime type that has more democratic features than a fully authoritarian regime, but still should not be understood as a democracy. Turkey has been autocratizing for at least 12 years; already in 2018 we at Freedom House rated it “Not Free,” a status it has kept ever since—albeit at the upper bound of that category. Yet despite the rampant repression in Turkey against the media and civil society, and the consolidation of Erdoğan’s control over the judiciary, the security services, the military, and every other arm of the state, İmamoğlu was able to win repeated elections in Turkey’s largest city. Not only that, but he had emerged as a plausible contender to Erdoğan—a fact confirmed not just by public polling, but by the risk Erdoğan has now taken in imprisoning him.
Ever since İmamoğlu and other opposition candidates swept municipal offices a year ago, Erdoğan recognized the current configuration of political forces was running against him. And just as he did in 2015 after his party lost its majority in parliamentary elections, when he turned against his previous policies of peacemaking with the Kurdish movement to ally himself with the nationalist far right, Erdoğan has been trying to redraw the country’s political map to ensure he remains in power.
The first move was to paint the Kurdish opposition into a corner. After years of raids, arrests, and the replacement of elected mayors with government-appointed “trustees,” the civilian arm of the movement is resilient but clearly exhausted from fighting a one-sided battle against the state with little support from other segments of society. Meanwhile, the armed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) has been hounded in its bases in Iraq by Turkish drone strikes and assassinations. The stunning revolution in Syria in December brought to power a close ally of Ankara and left the PKK’s ally in the north of the country, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), isolated and forced to withdraw from certain areas. At the same time, after the inauguration of Donald Trump, expectations have risen that the US will soon withdraw its troops from the SDF’s territory, leaving the SDF vulnerable to a final overwhelming incursion from Turkish proxies or the military itself.
With the movement on its back foot, Erdoğan and his far-right nationalist ally in parliament, Devlet Bahçeli, launched a new “peace process” through the imprisoned and isolated PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan. The outreach produced results at the end of February with the release of the first official letter in years from the leader, in which he called for the PKK to dissolve itself—without any meaningful concessions from the Turkish state. After Öcalan’s letter, the Kurdish movement is trying to salvage any leverage vis-à-vis the state that would ensure democratization and rights for Kurdish people in Turkey, while still advancing a peace process to end a war that has cost Kurds more than anyone else in Turkey. One much-discussed scenario entails the movement supporting Erdoğan in changing the constitution so he can remain president indefinitely, in exchange for freedom for Öcalan and Kurdish opposition leader Selahattin Demirtaş.
Now with İmamoğlu’s arrest, the pincer movement of Erdoğan’s strategy is clear. The charges against İmamoğlu span the usual grab-bag of corruption and malfeasance that Turkish prosecutors habitually drop on dissenters, including İmamoğlu. They also add a twist, however: an allegation that by coordinating with the Kurdish movement in the local elections last year, İmamoğlu formed a terrorist organization (though İmamoğlu was not formally charged with this over the weekend, prosecutors have said essentially they reserve the right to charge him with it later). It is no small irony that even as Erdoğan seeks to cut a deal with the Kurdish movement, his opponents can be threatened with prosecution for doing it. Combined with rumors that the state would impose a trustee on the CHP if it does not drop İmamoğlu, the purpose appears to be to tear apart the party by splitting it between its Turkish nationalist and progressive factions.
Amidst the escalating police violence and growing repression of the media as protesters express their dissent against İmamoğlu’s arrest, it can be easy to lose sight of Erdoğan’s fundamental claim: that only he can decide who will represent the Turkish people. This claim was already evident in the arrest of Demirtaş eight years ago, in which the CHP was shamefully complicit. It has now encompassed not only the Kurdish movement, which always existed at the edges of what the Turkish state deemed permissible, but the CHP itself. This claim abandons any pretense of democracy.
It therefore erases the competition in competitive authoritarianism, leaving only the unmodified regime type. Authoritarian rule is something many leaders are no longer attempting to disguise or seeking to explain away; they view their right to do as they please as inherent to their office. This evolution away from even nominal compliance with norms restraining impunity marks a dangerous threshold that the world will regret crossing, again.
The second administration of Donald Trump in the United States, with its even more pronounced America-first isolationism, pivot away from traditional allies, and cooperation with authoritarians like Russian President Vladimir Putin, has made it unlikely there will be meaningful support for Turkish democracy in Washington. The United States’ overt shift to short-term deal-making—as indicated by the agenda for this week’s visit of Turkish Foreign Min. Hakan Fidan to Washington—means there will likely be one less voice that will be urging Erdoğan to back away from the precipice. That makes the engagement of other democratic allies even more important, particularly as Europe considers how to strengthen its security and resilience in the face of a weakening transatlantic alliance. There will be a strong temptation to look the other way in order to advance Europe’s other priorities with Ankara. But European leaders should keep in mind a lesson of the last two decades: that a more openly authoritarian regime in Turkey, like in other states on the borders of the continent, will lead to far less security, and far more risk.