Refining the Authoritarian Playbook: Turkey’s Opposition Under Siege/ Yavuz Baydar/PALOMAR

PALOMAR, 16 August 2025

The AKP-MHP alliance is demonstrating for the world how to neutralize opposition through a potent cocktail of judicial abuse, psychological warfare, and old-fashioned coercion.

Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) isn’t just eroding democracy at home; it’s offering autocrats worldwide a fresh, constantly updated, brutal template for eliminating political opposition in broad daylight.

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his allies have escalated their assault on the main opposition, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), deploying methods as cunning as they are decisive.

Since late 2024, this four-pronged strategy has become a live-action guide on how to decimate your rivals without so much as batting an eye—through submission and oppression, used simultaneously.

The most Machiavellian stroke of the ruling AKP–MHP bloc has been to court Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned PKK leader. By dangling a murky, one-way “peace process” in front of the pro-Kurdish DEM Party, Erdoğan and his ally Devlet Bahçeli — leader of the National Movement Party (MHP) — are stoking old resentments and driving a wedge between the Kurds and the CHP.

The Kurdish movement, once a solid protest bloc against AKP rule, now faces a dilemma: defend the battered CHP, or pursue its own gains through an AKP/MHP-brokered “process.”

The message is clear: divided, the opposition faces yet another trap and may lose again.

The numbers paint a grim picture. As of July 2025, at least 16 CHP mayors have been jailed, with one under house arrest. The latest arrest shattered Istanbul’s Beyoğlu municipality, with more than 40 people detained, including the mayor.

Those arrested are not backbench nobodies, but the very faces of Turkey’s most emblematic cities. Here are some names.

• Ekrem İmamoğlu (Istanbul): Arrested in March 2025 on corruption allegations.
• Muhittin Böcek (Antalya): Hauled away and slapped with graft charges.
• Zeydan Karalar (Adana): One of the most beloved figures of the CHP, arrested alongside other officials in a sweep that hit southern Turkey.
• Tunç Soyer (Izmir): Another popular CHP veteran with deep local roots.

In Istanbul mayors from the disticts of Beşiktaş, Beykoz, Büyükçekmece, Şişli, and Beyoğlu round out the hit list, decapitating CHP’s municipal power

Since late 2024, over 500 people—mayors, deputies, city staff—have faced police raids. More than 200 have been jailed, systematically paralyzing the opposition’s governance nationwide.

The ruling bloc also offers a poison-pen deal: inform for the prosecution, or rot in a cell.

The “effective remorse” provision has become the stick-and-carrot of choice, pushing dozens of mid-level CHP members to collaborate or face the same fate as their leaders.

Istanbul’s city hall, once a beacon of pluralist politics, is now notorious for staff interrogations and forced confessions. Forty-seven officials were recently issued arrest orders, and nearly 70 have been detained as supposed accessories to graft.

Those who resist face disgrace, unemployment, or worse. Those who play ball walk free—or even switch sides, swelling the ranks of AKP loyalists and deepening the climate of polarisation and paranoia in opposition ranks.

The latest twist is pure, cynical genius: the government weaponizes “corruption” investigations not merely to arrest, but to splinter the opposition from within.

Mayors and municipal staff are told, in not-so-subtle terms: defect to the AKP now and escape punishment, or go down like the others for corruption, tender-rigging, or “terror” ties. Several officials, released after “cooperating,” openly migrated to the AKP, paraded as trophies to intimidate the rest.

The most spectacular example was the defection of Özlem Çerçioğlu, mayor of Aydın, a western province. Reportedly under pressure over alleged financial irregularities—including claims she used municipal resources to save her rubber rim factory, Jantsa—she is said to have pressured several district mayors to flee the CHP and join the AKP. The joining ceremony was gladly overseen by President Erdoğan himself.

And it’s working.

Lately, strong rumors—confirmed by some CHP sources—suggest that at least two mayors from major municipalities are under pressure to follow Çerçioğlu.

The CHP’s ranks are gutted, its leaders silenced or shamed, its municipalities run by AKP-appointed caretakers. Since the local elections of March 2024, which ended with a tangible victory for the CHP and other opposition parties, 53 municipalities have been “taken over” by the ruling bloc. Critics agree this is a successful revenge action by the AKP.

The country’s political landscape now eerily mirrors Azerbaijan or the Central Asian republics—all moves designed for a managed one-party state, with “opposition” only for show. Unless, of course, the opposition agrees to “a unified national front,” (İç Cephe) — a slogan increasingly amplified by pro-government media.

The ground, at home and abroad, is ripe. The judiciary serves as an efficient apparatus for arrests, alongside the security forces. Parliament has long been under AKP-MHP control, blocking all opposition motions to halt the authoritarian tide.

The composition of the latest so-called “National Solidarity, Brotherhood and Democracy Commission”—set up to oversee the “Kurdish process”—only reflects the domination of the ruling bloc.

And as this playbook unfolds, relations between Turkey and the U.S. have been reduced to a transactional link between Erdoğan and Trump. There are no signs the latter is concerned about Turkey’s chaotic domestic politics.

Turkey’s Western allies in NATO and the EU mutter platitudes and look the other way. Sure, there’s hand-wringing about F-35s, the occasional stern op-ed, and some chin-stroking over Turkey tilting toward Putin—but in practice, it amounts to little more than diplomatic tut-tutting while democracy is clubbed to death in daylight.

The EU’s moral outrage is exceeded only by its strategic caution: NATO’s concern lies less with Turkish democracy than with Ankara playing both sides between Russia and the West.

The AKP-MHP alliance is demonstrating for the world how to neutralize opposition through a potent cocktail of judicial abuse, psychological warfare, and old-fashioned coercion.

The lesson is chillingly clear: where liberal democracy is treated as an inconvenience, today’s Turkey is, as recent history has proven, tomorrow’s blueprint for autocrats everywhere. And soon, there may be little left of Turkish pluralism to mourn.