Turkey in depth, January 8, 2026
There are mornings when you wake up and discover someone has quietly replaced your streaming subscriptions with a box of VHS tapes. The picture is grainy, the dialogue familiar, the plot depressingly simple: detention, indictment, polarisation, and non-functioning courts. Welcome back to the future, 1990s Turkey in the 21st century.
At the end of December, the European Court of Human Rights decided to treat Ekrem İmamoğlu’s detention application as a priority case. In Strasbourg language, “priority” means the Court will not let the file wait politely in the queue with tens of thousands of others. This does not mean that the Court decided on the merits. But it sent a warning signal.
This is the déjà vu moment. It feels like we are back to the 1990s, maybe not procedurally, but atmospherically. During that decade the Convention system began functioning, in practice, as a parallel emergency procedure for claims that could not be reliably processed at home. When Strasbourg announced the acceleration of İmamoğlu’s application, it evoked memories of a familiar drift: the citizen’s legal horizon moves away from the national system and towards a European safety valve.
And the Court is not alone. Across Council of Europe institutions, the chorus sings the same song. The Congress of Local and Regional Authorities called İmamoğlu’s detention “an assault on democracy” and demanded his release. The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe called for his “immediate release” and said the arrest and detention appeared politically motivated.
This alignment is not about the legal merits of the ECHR case: it will be up to the Court to come to a judgement. But the alignment acts as a political-legal diagnosis of the state of Turkey. The litigation acts as a stress test for democracy, liberty, and the credibility of domestic institutions.
EUROPE’S LIMITS
How did we go back to the 1990s after having passed through the tunnel of reform for the EU in the early 2000s? The EU reform agenda, which was realised with the expertise and support of the Council of Europe, promised a simple but a very different story. The reforms were to be locked in by the gravity of Europe: the system learns stability, and it stops treating rights as optional accessories. But it did not turn out that way.
This juncture tells an uncomfortable and hidden story. This is not merely a “Turkey failing Europe’s test” but it is also evidence of Europe’s limits. Europe often behaves as though Turkey’s legal regression is tragic, regrettable, and oddly convenient. A Turkey that reforms seriously becomes harder to refuse. A Turkey that does not, or cannot, becomes easier to “manage”: keep the relationship transactional (migration, trade, security) while maintaining moral distance. A permanently “problematic” candidate is the perfect candidate, close enough to be useful, never close enough to join the family photograph.
This rather short-sighted logic bites back at the EU. Every time Europe treats Turkey’s reforms as optional or disposable, it erodes its own credibility as a values-based project. So, when Europe treats Turkey’s regression as a tragedy but also as a convenience, its claim that EU orbit transforms legal cultures falls short. And this is reflected in the EU’s silence on basic international law in the Middle East and recently Latin America.
DRIFTING BACK TO THE 1990S
Strasbourg’s “priority” is a symptom, legally and politically, that tells us “Turkey is drifting back toward a setting where the external safeguard system becomes salient again, because domestic mechanisms are not trusted to function as they should.” The symbolism feels “1990s”, because the relationship between citizen and state starts to resemble that decade’s logic. Everyone is waiting for courts to do what politics refused to do.
In the movie Back to the Future, the punchline is that you can alter the timeline if you act. In our Turkey version, everyone keeps arguing about the timeline while the clock runs anyway.