The First Day of a Darker Turkey—Could Your Country Be Next?

Turkey has crossed a new threshold with the detention of Ekrem İmamoğlu, the last viable opposition leader. If you think this is distant, think again—no country is immune.

Ekrem İmamoğlu. Src: Reuters / Murad Sezer.

Another threshold in Turkey’s authoritarian descent has been crossed. No independent judiciary. No functioning parliament. No free press. No freedom of speech. Speaking up comes at a cost. If you’re lucky, you lose your job. More likely, you end up in jail—maybe for insulting the president, maybe for being part of a terrorist organization you didn’t know existed, or perhaps for attempting to overthrow the government without realizing it. Persecution is a given.

Then there was the mirage of an opposition—permitted to exist so long as it remained manageable. When its voice grew too loud, it was crushed. When it stayed within limits, it legitimized the regime, giving it the international veneer of toleration. Albert Hirschman mapped this dynamic long ago in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty—the very framework that inspired the name of this newsletter.

This has been Turkey’s reality since 2011. I use the past tense because today, something changed.

At dawn, Istanbul’s mayor and the CHP’s presidential candidate-in-waiting, Ekrem İmamoğlu, was detained—his house raided by twenty-odd police officers. He is, by all accounts, the only opposition figure with a real shot at beating Erdoğan in a fair election. He won Istanbul’s mayorship three times against the ruling party’s candidate. And now, he is under investigation. For what? Leading an organization. Which organization? No one knows. What we do know is that they will find something. That’s how the arbitrariness of authoritarianism operates.

Simultaneously, another investigation is unfolding. Sources suggest a wide-ranging crackdown on journalists, lawyers, business figures, and artists—accused of ties to a fictitious organization that allegedly orchestrated the 2013 Gezi protests alongside Osman Kavala, who has already spent over five years behind bars. These two cases, running in parallel, will be enough to suffocate the opposition entirely. If not, there are other tools. As of now, Istanbul is under de facto emergency rule. Roads and metro lines leading to Taksim Square—where the Gezi protests erupted in 2013—are closed. Protests are banned. Social media is restricted.

Today, the Erdoğan regime levelled up by detaining its main political opponent. With this move, the only remaining institution—elections, flawed but still functional—has been rendered obsolete. The illusion of electoral competition, carefully maintained for years to preserve legitimacy, has now collapsed. This is the final step in Turkey’s transformation from ‘competitive authoritarianism’ to outright autocracy.

---

Turkey Didn’t Become Iran—It Became Russia under Putin

Before this unraveling, I had planned to write about a recent survey by KONDA, one of Turkey’s leading polling firms. It showed that between 2007 and 2025, the share of people who believe restaurants should remain open during Ramadan rose from 48% to 62%. The proportion who think they should be closed until iftar dropped from 38% to 24%. Those favoring full closure declined from 14% to 4%.

More than two decades under a so-called Islamist government, and yet Turkey’s understanding of public space and state-citizen relations is becoming more secular than ever. Why? One could argue it’s a dialectical push and pull—suffocate a people, and they move in the opposite direction. That logic might explain Iran’s underground nightlife and growing secular undercurrents. But it does not hold in Turkey’s context.

When the AKP first came to power, the military establishment—self-declared guardian of the Republic—saw it as a threat. Its founders came from an Islamist pedigree, rooted in Milli Görüş, the AKP’s ideological predecessor. The military initially attempted to block their rise and retain control, but to no avail. Meanwhile, the segment of society often labeled—rightly or wrongly, but mostly for convenience—as the Kemalist republican elite clung to a decades-old maxim: Turkey will not become Iran. That was the defining fear. It didn’t happen. But something just as corrosive did.

Many observers in the West (and even in Turkey) have misread the trajectory of Turkish authoritarianism. Those who once cheered the AKP’s early purges of the judiciary, bureaucracy, and media for clearing the country of its military tutelage now blame Erdoğan’s Islamist background for his descent into autocracy. No. That’s the wrong diagnosis. Turkey’s slide isn’t an isolated story, nor is it the central chapter in the story of Islamism. It’s part of a broader illiberal populist wave.

If we fail to see how Trump’s rise connects to Meloni, how Meloni ties to the rise of AfD in Germany, how AfD echoes Orban, and how Orban’s methods resemble Erdoğan’s—Poland’s politicization of the judiciary mirroring Erdoğan’s—we will never grasp the pattern.

If we tumble down the Orientalist hole and explain Turkey’s trajectory as the result of “weak institutions,” think again. We are talking about a modern and powerful state apparatus that has existed since the 18th-century Ottoman Empire in Istanbul. It took Erdoğan two decades to capture both the state and civil society. Have you been watching what is happening to checks and balances in the U.S. under Trump’s second term?

If we continue indulging in Eurocentric narratives that frame the Middle East as the natural home of resilient authoritarianism—when almost all of these regimes are the products of colonialism and post-colonial choices—while Western democracies remain the bastion of virtue, we will stay trapped in a parochial intellectual space. Let’s be clear: we are on the same battlefield.

This is not about Islamism. This is not just about Turkey. This is not just about the East or the South.

This is about a model of governance that trades democracy for majoritarian rule, using good arguments to justify it; institutions for personalist power, backed by corybantic social media trolls; and dissent for criminalization. What Erdoğan shares with Orban, Modi, or Netanyahu is a playbook—one in which ideology is a tool, not a goal. It is wielded for control, not conviction.

Today is the first day of a darker, new Turkey. And before you dismiss it as distant or exceptional, ask yourself: Can you be certain it will not be yours one day?