Could a darker turkey: could your country be the next one?

On March 19, 2025, in Dawn, another threshold in the authoritarian descent of the turkey was crossed.

Erdogan removing his opponent

In Dawn, the mayor of Istanbuls and the CHPS presidential candidate, Ekrem Mamolu, were arrested by twenty police officers. It is, by all the accounts, the only opposition figure with a real shot to beat Erdoan during a fair election.

Mamolu won the mayor of Istanbuls three times against the candidate of the ruling parties. And now he is the subject of an investigation.

For what? Direct an organization. What organization? No one knows. What we know is that they will find something. This is precisely how the arbitrariness of authoritarianism works.

A strong manifestation of the desire to please Erdogan

As if all this web was bad enough, consider this additional exposure of the total insuffleness: the University of Istanbul all of a sudden, and more conveniently for Erdogan, decided to revoke the university degree of Mamolu.

For what? It's simple. Any presidential candidate in Türkiye must have a university degree to qualify.

The revealing signs of oppression

No independent justice system. No functional parliament. No free press. No freedom of expression. This is the reality of turkeys since 2011.

Speaking at a cost. If you are lucky, you lose your job. More likely, you can find yourself in prison perhaps for insulting the president, perhaps to be part of a terrorist organization that you did not know exist or perhaps for trying to overthrow the government without realizing it. Persecution is a fact.

So far, there was the mirage of an opposition. After all, when he stayed in very narrow leaders, it legitimized the regime, giving it the international tolerance veneer.

He was thus authorized to exist as long as he remained manageable. When her voice became too strong, she was crushed. The arrest of Ekrem Mamolu was the final decision.

Part of a model

Simultaneously, another investigation takes place. Sources suggest that a large -scale repression against journalists, lawyers, business figures and artists is underway. They are accused of links with a fictitious organization.

This organization would have orchestrated the events of Gezi 2013 alongside Osman Kavala, who has already spent more than five years behind bars. These two cases, in parallel, will suffice to completely suffocate the opposition.

Otherwise, there are other tools. From now on, Istanbul is a de facto emergency rule. The roads and metro lines leading to Taksim Square where Gezi's demonstrations broke out in 2013 are closed. The demonstrations are prohibited. Social media is limited.

Today, the Erdoan regime has accumulated by holding its main political adversary. With this decision, the only elections of remaining, imperfect but still functional institutions have been made obsolete.

The illusion of electoral competition, carefully maintained for years to preserve legitimacy, has now collapsed. This is the last stage of the transformation of the turkeys of competitive authoritarianism in pure and simple autocracy.

Turkey has not become Iran, it has become Russia under Putin

Many observers in the West (and even in Türkiye) read the trajectory of Turkish authoritarianism under Erdogan. Those who have acclaimed the first AKPS purges of the judiciary, bureaucracy and the media for having erased the country with its military tutelage now blaming the Islamist origin of Erdoans for its descent into autocracy.

This is the bad diagnosis. Simply realize that turns sliding is not an isolated story, nor the central chapter of the history of Islamism. He is part of a wider illiberal populist wave.

If we do not see how the assets connect to Meloni, how Meloni is linked to the rise of AFD in Germany, how AFD echoes the Orban and how Orbans' methods resemble the politicization of the Erdoans of Erdoans of the magistracy of the Erdoans, we will never grasp the model.

If you are inclined to tumble the orientalist hole and explain the trajectory of turkeys as a result of weak institutions, think again.

We are talking about a modern and powerful state apparatus that has existed from the 18th century Ottoman Empire in Istanbul. It took two decades in Erdoan to capture both the state and civil society.

History beyond Turkey

Have you looked at what is happening to checks and counterweights in the United States just in the first two months of Trumps' second term?

If we continue to engage in Eurocentric stories that supervise the Middle East as the natural home of resilient authoritarianism while almost all these regimes are the products of colonialism and post-colonial choices while Western democracies remain the bastion of virtue, we will remain trapped in a parish intellectual space. Let's be clear: we are on the same battlefield.

Exchange democracy for a majority regime

It is not Islamism. It's not just a matter of turkey. It is not only about the east or southern. It is a governance model that negotiates democracy with checks and sales as institutional guarantees, you protect the separation of powers for the pure majority regime.

In such a regime, institutions are diverted for strictly personalized power, supported by social media trolls. Any dissent is criminalized.

What Erdoan shares with Orban, Modi or Netanyahu is a game book in which ideology is a tool, not a goal. He is exercised for control, not the conviction.

March 19, 2025 is the first day of a darker and darker Türkiye. And before rejecting it as distant or exceptional, ask yourself: can you be sure that it will not be yours one day?