On 21 May, an appeals court annulled the outcomes of the opposition Republican People’s Party’s (CHP) 2023 national congress, ejecting its elected leader, Özgür Özel, and reinstating his predecessor, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, who lost the last presidential election. Özel condemned the ruling as a judicial coup and refused to leave the party’s headquarters.

Three days later, riot police stormed the building to enforce the court order, firing rubber bullets and teargas and physically removing CHP members. Thousands marched in protest. The government denied any involvement, implausibly claiming the judiciary had acted independently. It was the latest escalation in a sustained campaign to destroy the only political force capable of defeating President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in 2028. The campaign has accelerated since Hungary showed how a unified opposition can beat an entrenched electoral autocrat.

Hungary’s warning

Hungary’s Viktor Orbán spent 16 years building an electoral autocracy, where competitive elections were held but the playing field was systematically skewed. He rewrote the constitution, restructured the constitutional court, gerrymandered the electoral map, captured the media, built a system of crony capitalism that handed state resources to loyalists and systematically restricted civil society. He rallied support by scapegoating migrants and LGBTQI+ people. It seemed impossible that he could be defeated at the polls. Yet in April, he lost by a landslide, beaten by moderate conservative Peter Magyar, a former ally who couldn’t be dismissed as a western-backed liberal, who ran as the candidate of a unified opposition.

The result confirmed that the greatest vulnerability of an authoritarian leader, in countries where elections are still competitive, is a credible and united opposition. Erdoğan appears determined to avoid Orbán’s fate. While pro-government commentators have insisted he’s safe because Turkey is different from Hungary, his recent actions suggest he’s taking no chances.

Erdoğan’s populism has some important differences from Orbán’s. While Hungary’s former leader attacked LGBTQI+ people and migrants, Erdoğan has targeted Turkey’s secular constitutional tradition, embracing political Islam as a source of legitimacy. Civil society organisations, universities and other secular institutions have been targeted, along with journalists who cover the influence of Islamist brotherhoods and networks.

Two decades of accumulated power

Erdoğan has been in power since 2003, first as prime minister and then, after changing the constitution, as president. After surviving a coup attempt in July 2016, he used emergency powers to lead a mass purge. In the following months, over 150,000 people were detained, fired or suspended from public service jobs, including civil servants, judges, military officers and teachers. Erdoğan used emergency decrees, many of which later became permanent laws, to dramatically expand the government’s power to shut down organisations, seize assets and remove elected officials from office. Then the 2017 constitutional referendum, approved by a narrow majority in a campaign independent observers found deeply flawed, replaced Turkey’s parliamentary system with a hyper-presidential one that concentrated power in presidential hands.

Erdoğan has systematically dismantled independent media. Turkey ranks 163rd out of 180 countries on Reporters Without Borders’ 2026 World Press Freedom Index. Most major newspapers and TV channels are owned by business groups dependent on state contracts and government goodwill. Independent outlets face coordinated financial pressure through the selective allocation of state advertising and punitive fines from the broadcast regulator, while the justice system is routinely used to prosecute critical journalists, increasingly on charges of spreading disinformation. Civil society has faced persistent legal harassment.

Yet despite this, elections have continued to take place, and the opposition has continued to win municipal-level votes, most dramatically in 2019 and again in 2024. This remaining electoral competitiveness is what Erdoğan is now moving to shut down.

Removing the frontrunner

The assault on the CHP was the second act of a campaign whose first move came in March 2025, when Turkish authorities arrested Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu on charges of corruption and links with terrorism as he was being nominated as the CHP’s 2028 presidential candidate. This triggered Turkey’s largest protests in over a decade.

İmamoğlu’s arrest came on top of a prison sentence and political ban imposed in December 2022 for insulting election officials, followed by a second conviction in February 2025 for criticising a public prosecutor. Legal pressure on him intensified while he was in prison in November 2025, when prosecutors filed a 4,000-page indictment seeking a sentence of over 2,000 years, adding espionage charges in February 2026. His trial began in March amid heavy public protests. He remains imprisoned while proceedings continue.

İmamoğlu wasn’t the CHP’s party chair. That role belonged to Özel, who took over in November 2023 following Kılıçdaroğlu’s presidential election defeat. İmamoğlu’s power derived from being the mayor of Istanbul, Turkey’s largest city and economic capital, and the opposition’s most electorally successful politician. He beat the candidate of Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Istanbul twice, including in a government-forced rerun, before being formally nominated as presidential candidate in a primary that saw around 1.7 million members and a whopping 13 million non-members support him. He polled strongly against Erdoğan nationally.

İmamoğlu’s detention reflected a shift in Erdoğan’s strategy. Tilting the playing field was no longer enough. The opposition’s star performer had to be removed from the competition. Over the 14 months since, authorities have detained over 500 more people, including 16 CHP-affiliated mayors.

Fracturing the opposition and widening the crackdown

With İmamoğlu removed, Erdoğan’s next step was to ensure the CHP couldn’t rally behind anyone else. The 21 May court ruling and ensuing police raid sought to fragment the opposition to prevent the kind of challenge faced by Orbán.

The CHP won Ankara as well as Istanbul in the 2019 local elections and, under Özel’s more combative leadership, swept almost all major cities in 2024. By early 2026, the CHP was running roughly even with the AKP in national polls. Özel consolidated the party’s leadership, raised its profile and seemed to be moving towards becoming a unifying opposition candidate. By reinstating Kılıçdaroğlu, a divisive figure with a record of losing against Erdoğan, the court ruling has reversed that consolidation.

The campaign against the CHP has unfolded alongside a wider assault on civic space. When protests erupted after İmamoğlu’s arrest, the government imposed multi-day blanket bans on public gatherings across multiple cities, restricted social media platforms, including Instagram, TikTok, Twitter/X and YouTube, and shut down major public transport routes in Istanbul. By 27 March 2025, at least 1,879 people had been taken into custody, including activists, journalists, lawyers, students, union leaders and some children. The Progressive Lawyers Association documented incidents of ill-treatment, sexual violence and torture in detention facilities.

Prominent civil society figures remain in prison. Philanthropist Osman Kavala, detained since October 2017, is one of many who continue to serve sentences on baseless charges related to protests in 2013. The government has consistently ignored binding European Court of Human Rights rulings ordering his release.

Mass arrests and violence have become standard tools for suppressing reporting on protests, while journalists who cover corruption, religious groups or attacks on secularism face threats from ultranationalist forces aligned with the government.

Attempts to silence dissent extend to higher education. On 23 May, Erdoğan ordered the closure of Istanbul’s Bilgi University, one of Turkey’s oldest private universities and a well-known liberal academic hub. The university had been placed under state management eight months earlier following a criminal investigation into its owner. Hundreds of students and staff gathered outside the campus to protest. Within two days, under the pressure of the outcry, the government reversed the closure.

Rewriting the rules

What informs all these moves is a long-term project to ensure Erdoğan’s personal hold on power outlasts his constitutional term limit. Turkey’s constitution restricts presidents to two five-year terms, and Erdoğan’s second expires in 2028. In May 2025, he appointed a legal team to draft a new constitution that critics fear will extend his eligibility.

The AKP has 276 parliamentary seats, and its nationalist allies hold an additional 45, still short of the 400 parliamentary votes required to amend the constitution, or even the 360 needed to call a constitutional referendum. Some believe the government’s recent initiative to end the decades-long conflict with the militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party is at least partly motivated by the desire to attract support from its members of parliament to get past the constitutional threshold.

Turkey’s hyper-presidential system makes the prospects of electoral defeat particularly threatening. Hungary’s parliamentary system meant that while Orbán lost power, his party stands a chance of making a comeback. For Erdoğan, defeat could mean total political extinction. The incentive to prevent any genuinely competitive election is therefore higher.

Challenges ahead

Orbán’s defeat brought hope among Turkish pro-democracy forces. Social media pulsed with anticipation as results came in. But the lessons can’t be imported directly. Hungary’s growing autocracy could be reversed at the ballot box because several factors coincided: a credible former insider candidate, an economic downturn and an electoral architecture that, however tilted, still allowed a unified and mobilised majority to prevail.

Erdoğan is working hard to dismantle some of these conditions. Jailed and facing a permanent political ban, İmamoğlu can’t play the role Magyar did. The CHP has been deliberately fractured and put back in the hands of its most divisive former leader.

But Turkey’s civil society hasn’t submitted. People took to the streets in huge numbers in response to İmamoğlu’s arrest, and a further mass rally marked the 100th day since the arrest. Police as usual intervened forcefully, using teargas and detaining protesters and journalists. People marched again after the CHP headquarters were stormed, and yet again when the government attempted to close Bilgi University, an episode that illustrated both the extent of the government’s repressive urges and their limits when met with swift resistance. The future of Turkish democracy may hinge on whether enough people can keep resisting.

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