This article is part of a series from countries that have experienced an authoritarian turn from democracy. Access the rest of the symposium here
Nothing is horrible enough for us anymore. Nothing shocks us. When we, the people of Turkey, hear our friends lament the demise of democracy, we nod without surprise. We have spent more than two decades in a slow boil, in despair and exhaustion. And yet, there is a kind of triumph in the fact that we are not yet fully cooked. So we go about our days, watching the state’s ever more aggressive crackdown on dissent. When we turn our gaze outward, we see that democracy in Europe and in the US is following Turkey’s path. We take it in with a certain detachment.
This brings forth the levity in scanning the daily news and throwing out a joke—has Hungary’s Viktor Orbán harassed more academics than Recep Tayyip Erdoğan? Is Donald Trump’s entourage still more embarrassing than the obsequious tribe surrounding Erdoğan? Unseriousness and its best friend, cynicism, may help us through the day. But they do little for Turkey. Cynicism breeds a sedentary bitterness. I strongly advise against it.
Here is a bird’s-eye view of what happened in Turkey. In our modern history, authoritarianism has always been part of the landscape, though periodically disrupted by military coups. But never has authoritarianism been this entrenched, this consolidated, this all-encompassing, as under Turkey’s current president.
Erdoğan’s freshly minted Justice and Development Party (AKP) was elected in 2002. At the time, many, especially European powers and the US, praised the party as the perfect synthesis of Islamism and neoliberalism. The AKP, realising it had to dismantle what it saw as the republican, secular establishment—business, bureaucracy, judiciary—moved gradually, with military backing, forging a series of crucial alliances.
The first pact was with the liberal intelligentsia and the EU, both eager to support what they saw as a democratising force. This backing brought foreign investment and economic growth, boosting the AKP’s popularity. During this period, Erdoğan set out to cultivate his own bourgeoisie to supplant the secular, Istanbul-based elite that had dominated the country’s economy. Weaponising extreme favouritism in public procurement, the party created a dependent bourgeoisie and “domesticated” the old one. Fear became the primary tool—fear of expropriation, astronomical tax fines and exclusion from state tenders.
The real consolidation of power, however, began after the AKP’s third electoral victory in 2011, which brings us to its second and far more consequential alliance—with the movement led by Fethullah Gülen, an Islamic organisation now designated as a terrorist group in Turkey. This partnership enabled the AKP to purge the old guard from the state through sham trials. Military generals, politicians and journalists stood accused of attempts to overthrow the government and were replaced with loyalists.
In the intervening years the Gülenists fell out with the AKP, and there were breaking points. The Gezi protests of 2013, when millions took to the streets against Erdoğan’s increasingly undemocratic rule. The botched 2016 coup, orchestrated by the AKP’s now former ally, the Gülen movement—a power struggle fit for a Greek tragedy. Erdoğan was right about the criminality of the Gülen network—its covert infiltration of state institutions and its use of fabricated trials. But he took that truth and wielded it. It gave him the perfect excuse to extend his repression far beyond the Gülenists, sweeping up journalists, academics, opposition politicians, civil servants.
Turkey is now ruled by a strongman under a hyper-presidential system, backed by an oligarchic party with a vast clientelist network. If you dare speak your mind, you may face a knock at the door at 4am and the all-too-familiar charge of terrorism.
Two steps dealt the most devastating blows to democracy. First, the systematic dismantling of the free press: media owners were pressured or forced to sell their outlets to Erdoğan’s loyalists, while independent journalists were jailed on fabricated charges. Second, the destruction of the judiciary: rule of law was replaced with rule by law, the law itself morphing into whatever served Erdoğan’s interests.
In 2010, when I was managing editor of a liberal-left newspaper, I remember attending a protest against the imprisonment of several colleagues. I turned around and realised that I knew everyone there. We were just a handful of journalists, standing in the street, shouting about the importance of press freedom. But it was already too late. The populist narrative that journalists were “elites”, and “enemies of the people” had taken hold. We—who could barely make ends meet, who put our lives on the line—could not even rally a handful of readers to stand with us. And so, things accelerated.
We should not have abandoned the Kurds when they cried out about rights abuses. We should have listened to the lawyers who warned about the co-optation of the judiciary. No restriction on the free press is small, no interference with an independent judiciary is insignificant. Authoritarian leaders want to control civil society and create a subservient bourgeoisie. Preserving autonomous centres of power is key. As we watch yet more countries slide into illiberalism, we must remind ourselves that we shape our future in the present—and we must act accordingly.
Through years of deepening authoritarianism, one thing never changed: we took elections seriously, no matter how blatantly rigged the system was. The opposition never stood on level ground, and yet we voted. Turkey’s voter turnout still hovers around 85 per cent, and in a competitive authoritarian system, that matters. A bad result can signal to the regime that defeat may be on the cards.
And Erdoğan did lose. In March 2024, despite staggering disadvantages, the opposition won all major cities, including Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir. Opposition parties managed to put aside their differences and work together to weaken Erdoğan at the ballot box. The blow rattled Erdoğan, whose meteoric ascent began with the Istanbul mayorship in 1994. His response has been a fresh wave of crackdowns, driven by his government’s insecurity.
In 2028, Turks will vote in a presidential election. Erdoğan may try to sideline his main rival, but it won’t change one central thing: the people of Turkey will keep turning up, fighting to get their country back.
