by INES M. POUSADELA
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Jun 15 2026 (IPS) – When Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán lost by a landslide to a unified opposition in April, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was watching. The lesson he drew was not that he should be more moderate; it was that he needed to crack down harder. He had already arrested Istanbul Mayor Ekrem ?mamo?lu, the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP)’s leading presidential contender, in March 2025. After Orbán’s defeat, he has accelerated his campaign to fracture the opposition and rewrite the rules before the next election in 2028.
Electoral autocracy
Erdogan has been in power since 2003. After surviving a coup attempt in July 2016, he used emergency powers to purge the state at scale. Over 150,000 people were detained, fired or suspended from their jobs. Emergency decrees expanded the government’s power to shut down organisations and remove elected officials. A 2017 constitutional referendum, narrowly approved in a campaign that independent observers found deeply flawed, replaced Turkey’s parliamentary system with a hyper-presidential one.
Independent media has been systematically dismantled. Turkey now ranks 163rd out of 180 countries on Reporters Without Borders’ 2026 World Press Freedom Index. Yet elections have continued, and the opposition has continued to win at the municipal level, most strikingly in Istanbul in 2019 and again by an even wider margin in 2024. That residual competitiveness is what Erdogan is now moving to close.
Imamoglu had beaten Erdogan’s candidate in Istanbul twice, was formally nominated as the CHP’s 2028 presidential candidate and polled strongly against Erdogan nationally. Authorities arrested him on charges of corruption and links with terrorism as his nomination was under way, triggering Turkey’s largest wave of protests in over a decade. A 4,000-page indictment filed in November 2025 sought to sentence him to over 2,000 years in prison. Espionage charges followed in February 2026. His trial began in March amid continuing protests. He remains in prison, and in the 14 months since his arrest, over 500 more people have been detained, including 16 CHP-affiliated mayors.
With Imamoglu imprisoned, Erdogan’s next move was to prevent the CHP from consolidating around anyone else. On 21 May, an appeals court annulled the outcomes of the CHP’s 2023 national congress, ejecting the party’s elected leader Özgür Özel, who had raised the CHP to rough parity with Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) in national polls, and reinstating his predecessor Kemal Kiliçdaroglu, a divisive figure 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 in, firing rubber bullets and teargas. The government denied any involvement, implausibly claiming the judiciary had acted independently. The operation was legal in form and political in substance.
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