Adem Yavuz Arslan* 

There is a simple way to understand how far Turkey’s democracy has deteriorated under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Look at what happened in Üsküdar, one of İstanbul’s most prominent districts.

Voters removed Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) from power in the district in the March 2024 local elections. The opposition candidate won comfortably. Two years later, however, the elected mayor was in jail and the municipality was back under AKP control — without the voters ever reversing their decision.

What happened in between offers a disturbing snapshot of Turkey’s political transformation under Erdoğan. It also raises a much larger question ahead of the country’s next presidential election: If Erdoğan finds a legal route to run again and loses at the ballot box, will the winner actually be allowed to take power?

Erdoğan has reached the two-term limit under Turkey’s executive presidential system. To run again, he would need parliament to call an early election during his current term or a constitutional amendment changing or resetting the limit. The possibility of another Erdoğan candidacy nevertheless remains a central part of Turkey’s political debate.

The question of whether power would change hands after an Erdoğan defeat would have sounded alarmist in Turkey two decades ago. It no longer does.

From reformer to one-man rule

The AKP first came to power in 2002, and Erdoğan became prime minister the following year. His early governments presented themselves as reformist and pro-European. They pursued European Union membership, curtailed the military’s political influence and introduced a series of legal and economic reforms.

Nearly a quarter-century later, the country looks very different.

The independent media landscape was gradually dismantled. Major newspapers and television networks changed ownership and ended up largely in the hands of businesses close to the government. Critical broadcasters faced regulatory penalties, while journalists faced investigations, prosecutions and imprisonment. At the height of a post-coup crackdown in 2016, Turkey became the world’s leading jailer of journalists, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

The bureaucracy underwent an even more dramatic transformation after the failed coup of July 2016, when tens of thousands of public employees were dismissed. A 2017 constitutional referendum abolished Turkey’s parliamentary system, and the presidential system that took full effect in 2018 concentrated enormous executive power in Erdoğan’s office.

The judiciary also became increasingly politicized. Human Rights Watch said in its 2026 assessment that Erdoğan’s government exercised control over domestic courts and continued to disregard binding judgments of the European Court of Human Rights. It described the government’s assault on the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) as a threat to political association and to free and fair elections.

Erdoğan had succeeded in concentrating extraordinary power in the presidency. But one part of the system remained unpredictable: the ballot box.

The election Erdoğan could not overturn

İstanbul demonstrated the limits of Erdoğan’s control in 2019. Ekrem İmamoğlu, then a relatively little-known CHP politician, defeated the AKP candidate in the İstanbul mayoral election. The margin was narrow — roughly 13,000 votes.

The AKP challenged the result, and Turkey’s Supreme Election Board annulled the election. İstanbul voted again.

This time İmamoğlu did not win by 13,000 votes. He won by more than 800,000. The attempt to reverse the election had backfired spectacularly.

Five years later the political problem became even bigger for Erdoğan. In the March 2024 local elections, the CHP finished first nationwide. It retained İstanbul and Ankara and won control of many of Turkey’s most important cities. İmamoğlu defeated the AKP again.

By then, however, he was no longer merely the mayor of İstanbul. He had emerged as perhaps the strongest potential challenger to Erdoğan for the presidency.

The confrontation subsequently moved from the ballot box to the courthouse. Police detained İmamoğlu on March 19, 2025, and a court arrested him pending trial four days later on corruption charges. The government insisted that the case was a matter for an independent judiciary and denied accusations of political interference. İmamoğlu and the CHP said the investigation was designed to remove Erdoğan’s most dangerous electoral rival.

The broader pattern made those suspicions difficult to dismiss. According to a Deutsche Welle tally published in July, at least 39 CHP-run municipalities had become the subject of corruption and bribery investigations launched after the 2024 elections. Mayors had been detained in 31 of them, and 26 mayors remained in prison. What began with individual investigations increasingly looked like a restructuring of the political map produced by the 2024 election.

The opposition itself was also transformed. In May a court removed Özgür Özel as CHP chairman and reinstated former leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu. Özel and 90 lawmakers subsequently left the CHP and established the New Party, which became the largest opposition group in parliament. The judicial intervention that fractured the party added another dimension to concerns that election results were being reshaped through institutions outside the ballot box.

Win an election, lose the municipality

The controversy became even more serious when elected officials began switching to Erdoğan’s party. Aydın Mayor Özlem Çerçioğlu in western Turkey, elected on the CHP ticket, left the opposition party and joined the AKP in August 2025. Then-CHP leader Özel subsequently alleged that Çerçioğlu had effectively been given a choice: join the AKP or go to notorious Marmara Prison on the outskirts of İstanbul in Silivri.

Çerçioğlu strongly denied the allegation and filed a criminal complaint against Özel. There is therefore no established evidence that such an ultimatum was delivered.

But the political outcome was undeniable. The voters of Aydın elected a CHP mayor. Before the end of her term, their mayor was an AKP politician.

Then came Üsküdar.

The Üsküdar case

Üsküdar carries particular symbolic significance. The conservative İstanbul district had long been controlled by the AKP before CHP candidate Sinem Dedetaş defeated the governing party in March 2024.

On July 31 a court arrested Dedetaş pending trial on allegations of bribery, extortion through abuse of office and establishing and leading a criminal organization. The allegations involved construction and occupancy permit procedures. The Interior Ministry subsequently suspended her from office.

The city council then had to choose an acting mayor. It did so on August 5.

The opposition’s candidate, Sibel Tan Çetinkaya, won. In other words, removing the elected mayor did not change the political control of the municipality. The council majority created by the 2024 election kept Üsküdar in opposition hands.

The AKP challenged the council vote. The İstanbul 2nd Administrative Court suspended implementation of the council’s decision, and a regional administrative court rejected an appeal against the suspension on September 2. A second election was then scheduled for September 5.

Only days before that vote, another round of police operations targeted municipal officials. Deputy mayors and other officials were detained, while two opposition council members were jailed. At roughly the same time four council members elected on CHP tickets resigned from the party and joined the AKP.

CHP and New Party council members boycotted the September 5 session, saying their detained colleagues should be allowed to participate. Only 22 members attended, one short of the required quorum, and the vote was postponed until September 8.

By then, the balance had changed. The AKP and its political ally, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), and the opposition each had 21 council members available to vote. After four rounds of voting, AKP candidate Dündar Ziya Gültekin received 23 votes. The opposition candidate received 19.

Üsküdar was now controlled by the AKP.

The sequence matters more than any individual episode.

The voters rejected the AKP. The elected opposition mayor was jailed. The city council elected another opposition politician. A court blocked that result. More opposition officials were detained before the new vote. Council members changed parties. A second vote was held. The AKP ended up controlling a municipality it had failed to win at the ballot box.

Each step can be presented separately as a judicial proceeding, an administrative decision or an individual political choice. Taken together, they tell a different story.

The new phase of Erdoğan’s authoritarianism

For much of Erdoğan’s rule, the central criticism was that Turkey’s elections were unfair but still competitive.

The government enjoyed overwhelming advantages. Erdoğan dominated television coverage. State resources benefited the governing party. Opposition politicians and journalists faced criminal investigations. Courts and electoral institutions operated under enormous political pressure.

Yet opposition parties could still win elections. The developments since 2019 point toward something potentially more consequential.

The question is no longer simply whether the opposition can win. It is whether winning guarantees the right to govern. That distinction is crucial.

Authoritarian systems do not necessarily abolish elections. Many continue to hold them. The defining question is whether elections retain the capacity to remove those in power.

Turkey’s opposition demonstrated in 2019 and again in 2024 that it could defeat Erdoğan’s party despite an extraordinarily uneven political playing field. The response that followed has increasingly shifted from competing with the opposition to constraining what the opposition can do with its victories.

That is why the imprisonment of İmamoğlu and the transfer of municipalities such as Üsküdar matter far beyond local politics. They concern the remaining mechanism through which political power in Turkey can still change hands.

And where is the West?

There is another uncomfortable dimension to this story. None of Turkey’s democratic deterioration has taken place in secret.

European governments know what has happened to the judiciary. Washington knows what has happened to the media. NATO governments know that opposition politicians, journalists and civil society figures have been jailed.

The European Parliament itself has repeatedly documented Turkey’s democratic backsliding. In June 2026 it said the country had continued moving toward an authoritarian model over the previous decade and warned about the erosion of human rights, civil society and the rule of law.

Yet the same European Parliament simultaneously described Turkey as a country of “strategic importance,” a NATO ally and a partner with which Europe needed cooperation in areas of mutual strategic interest. That contradiction has defined Western policy toward Erdoğan.

Turkey lies along one of the main migration routes into Europe. It sits between Europe, Russia, the Caucasus and the Middle East. It controls the strategically vital Turkish Straits, which connect the Black Sea with the Mediterranean, under the Montreux Convention. It has NATO’s second-largest armed forces by active-duty personnel. It matters to Western strategy on Ukraine, Russia, the Black Sea, Syria and the Middle East.

For the EU, Turkey is also deeply intertwined with European trade, security, energy and migration policy. The European Parliament has explicitly acknowledged these interests even while documenting severe democratic regression.

Erdoğan learned how to exploit this contradiction. When Europe needed help controlling migration, Ankara had leverage. When NATO needed Turkish approval for alliance decisions, Ankara had leverage. When Russia invaded Ukraine and the Black Sea became strategically critical, Turkey’s importance increased again.

As regional crises multiplied, Erdoğan became harder for Western capitals to confront. The result was not Western silence in the literal sense. Washington and Brussels issued statements, criticized arrests and repeatedly called for respect for democratic institutions.

But criticism rarely translated into political costs capable of altering Erdoğan’s behavior. Human Rights Watch highlighted precisely this contradiction ahead of the 2026 NATO summit in Ankara, arguing that alliance leaders were arriving in a country where Erdoğan had consolidated power in the presidency while using the courts against the opposition that defeated his party in the 2024 local elections.

The problem, therefore, is not that Western governments failed to see Turkey’s democratic collapse. They saw it.

The more difficult accusation is that strategic necessity repeatedly took precedence over democratic principles. For Erdoğan, that calculation provided room to maneuver.

For Turkey’s democrats, it carried a very different message: Western governments might condemn authoritarianism, but there were limits to how far they were prepared to challenge an indispensable NATO ally over it.

The question that now hangs over Turkey

This brings Turkey to its next and most dangerous test. İmamoğlu, Erdoğan’s most formidable potential presidential challenger, is in prison.

Dozens of opposition mayors have been detained. Municipalities won by the opposition have changed political control during their elected terms. The institutions that would oversee or adjudicate a disputed national election — election boards, courts and the bureaucracy — operate in a political environment transformed during Erdoğan’s nearly quarter-century in power.

The question being asked in Turkey is therefore no longer hypothetical: If Erdoğan secures a legal route to run again and then loses, will power be transferred? Or will the mechanisms seen first in İstanbul and later in municipalities such as Üsküdar appear on a national scale?

Nobody can know the answer in advance. But the fact that millions of Turkish voters have reason to ask the question is itself an indictment of how far the country’s democratic institutions have deteriorated.

Democracy ultimately depends on something more fundamental than elections. It depends on the losing side accepting defeat.

Turkey still has ballot boxes. Opposition parties still campaign. Millions still vote. And, despite the imbalance of power, the opposition still wins elections.

What has become uncertain is what happens after it wins.

Üsküdar offers a warning of where that uncertainty can lead: The opposition can contest an election. It can win. It can even win repeatedly. And it can still lose power afterward.

That is the emerging meaning of Erdoğan-style democracy.

*Adem Yavuz Arslan is a journalist with over two decades of experience in political reporting, investigative journalism and international conflict coverage. His work has focused on Turkey’s political landscape, including detailed reporting on the 2016 coup attempt and its aftermath, as well as broader issues related to media freedom and human rights. He has reported from conflict zones such as Bosnia, Kosovo and Iraq, and has conducted in-depth research on high-profile cases, including the assassination of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink. Arslan is the author of four books and has received journalism awards for his investigative work. Currently living in exile in Washington, D.C., he continues his journalism through digital media platforms, including his YouTube channel, Turkish Minute, TR724 and X.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Turkish Minute.