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

On March 19, 2025, at dawn, another threshold in Turkey’s authoritarian descent has been crossed.

Erdogan removing his opponent

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.

İmamoğlu 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 is precisely how the arbitrariness of authoritarianism operates.

A strong manifestation of the yearning to please Erdogan

As if all of that web’s bad enough, consider this additional exhibit of utter gutlessness: Istanbul University all of a sudden, and most conveniently for Erdogan, decided to revoke İmamoğlu’s university degree.

Why? It’s simple. Any presidential candidate in Turkey must have a university degree in order to be qualified o run.

The telltale signs of oppression

No independent judiciary. No functioning parliament. No free press. No freedom of speech. This has been Turkey’s reality since 2011.

Speaking up comes at a cost. If you are 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 did not know existed or perhaps for attempting to overthrow the government without realizing it. Persecution is a given.

Until now, there was the mirage of an opposition. After all, when it stayed within the rulers’ very narrow limits, it legitimized the regime, giving it the international veneer of toleration.

It was thus permitted to exist so long as it remained manageable. When its voice grew too loud, it was crushed. The arrest of Ekrem İmamoğlu was the final move.

Part of a pattern

Simultaneously, another investigation is unfolding. Sources suggest that a wide-ranging crackdown on journalists, lawyers, business figures and artists is underway. They are accused of ties to a fictitious organization.

That “organization” 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

Many observers in the West (and even in Turkey) have misread the trajectory of Turkish authoritarianism under Erdogan. 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.

That is the wrong diagnosis. Just realize that Turkey’s slide is not an isolated story, nor is it the central chapter in the story of Islamism. It is 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 the AfD in Germany, how the 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 you are inclined to 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.

The story beyond Turkey

Have you been watching what is happening to “checks and balances” in the United States just within the first two months of 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.

Trading democracy for majoritarian rule

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 with checks and balances as institutional safeguards yo protect the separation of powers for pure majoritarian rule.

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

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.

March 19, 2025 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?