As Turkey reels from the detention of leading opposition figure Ekrem İmamoğlu, a Turkish political scientist analyses why this is truly the last exit before autocracy
Ok. Imagine a game of football – soccer, if you are American – that isn’t played on a nice flat surface, but rather on a hill, with the pitch sloping one way. (Maybe, over time, the slope is getting steeper too.)
There are two teams: let’s call one ‘Regime’ and the other ‘Opposition’. Team Regime has the high ground. Their goal – the thing you have to kick the ball through to get a point – is at the top of the hill, hard but not impossible to reach. Whenever the ball is kicked up towards their goal the force of gravity makes it roll back towards Team Opposition’s naturally far more vulnerable goal.
The referees are supposed to be neutral. And I mean, they really do look like referees, with whistles and earpieces for getting advice from the other refs off the pitch. But actually, they’re in the pocket of Team Regime. And if the game gets too close, the refs start handing out red cards to their opponent’s star players. It goes from being a game of 15 against 15, to 15 against 12, to 15 against 10. There’s always a pretext for sending someone off.
Now, one could still call this a game of football. But is it fair? Of course not.
This is the analogy political scientist Şebnem Gümüşçü uses to describe “competitive authoritarianism,” the political system she says has been operating in Turkey since 2015, if not before. It looks competitive – there are political parties, rallies, elections – but the whole thing is skewed. (Gümüşçü has written a book on the subject).
Competitive authoritarianism might seem bad enough. But in an interview with Fayn, Gümüşçü is asked to use political science to analyse what’s going on now. What happens when Team Regime simply starts rewriting the rulebook, eliminating Team Opposition or threatening their interests off the pitch (tyres slashed, business busted, that kind of thing)? When does the game change from managed democracy to outright autocracy?
After the detention in March of Turkey’s main opposition leader Ekrem İmamoğlu – and a widening crackdown since – Turkey has now reached a point of no return, Gümüşçü says. It either becomes a full-blown autocracy or somehow it becomes a genuine democracy. Which will it be?
It’s not that everything happening now is new. Selahattin Demirtaş, a Kurdish political leader who threatened to upend things, has been locked up since 2016. But to continue the football analogy, he was a right-back, not a goal scorer. He couldn’t win power by himself. Taking him off the pitch, Gümüşçü suggests, is not the same as locking up İmamoğlu and his whole team.
Before, she says, the opposition had to work harder to get into the game of power, yes. It had to go door-to-door drumming up support, it had to be more creative. But what the government’s actions indicate now is that it intends to decide everything alone: “I’ll run for a third term, maybe a fourth. I’ll stay in power until I die”. The opposition might be allowed to compete with the ruling coalition at a local level, but they shouldn’t ask for too much: “they shouldn’t make a nuisance of themselves”.
Gümüşçü identifies several factors shaping what happens next: how the masses respond, whether the opposition can channel “mass energy” into an ongoing political dynamic – bringing forward national elections slated for 2028, for example – and whether this splits the ruling coalition, either between its two parties (the AKP – President Erdoğan’s party – and the nationalist MHP) or within them. At some point, some in the coalition might feel they are losing, worry about the cost, and seek a transition: “one of the most important and reasonable ways to exit authoritarianism”.
How about external actors, from beyond the sphere of domestic party politics? What about Turkish business, or the EU and the US?
“I don’t think it was a coincidence that it happened [İmamoğlu being locked up] after Trump was elected”, Gümüşçü says: “But would he have done it if Trump hadn’t been elected? Yes.” Maybe not so quickly, and in a different way – but ultimately it would have happened. Foreign criticism of domestic politics is a double-edged sword in any case, Gümüşçü notes. It can always be viewed as ‘interference’.
As for Turkish business, it’s tricky to know what it thinks. There have long been tensions. Gümüşçü recalls a 2013 tax audit against a major conglomerate viewed as backing anti-government protests: Koç Holdings. Before that, multi-billion-dollar fines against a media mogul ultimately led to the transfer of news titles to government sympathisers.
More recently, a government financial regulator, the TMSF, has been given fresh powers widely seen as being a new political front for the regime in the economy. The opposition tried to get TMSF’s new powers ruled unconstitutional. Business leaders who criticised the powers found themselves facing a ban against going abroad.
In liberal theory, Fayn points out, authoritarianism and foreign investment don’t mix. China and the UAE still attract foreign investment, Gümüşçü notes. But there’s a different dynamic here. China and UAE have long been understood as authoritarian. With Turkey: “we are sliding from democracy to authoritarianism, with constant instability”.
There were off-ramps on this slide towards authoritarianism: the 2007 election, and the 2010 constitutional changes (when a whole set of ‘reforms’, some which Gümüşçü supports, others with unexpectedly dire consequences, were bundled up together to “confuse” people – political scientists included, she admits).
At this point, after 23 years in power, there is a significant time factor at play in changing direction, or getting people off the AKP. Gümüşçü’s fieldwork points to the nature of these sunk costs. It’s not just about economics. (“Makarna kömür değil o hikâye” – it’s not a story just about macaroni and coal, Translator’s favourite line of the interview). “There are emotional ties”, she says: “if they received support even once in 23 years, for example, when an infant was ill, when a disabled child needed help, you are now talking about a giant debt of gratitude”. Housewives have a particularly strong bond to the AKP, Gümüşçü notes, and after 23 years, it won’t be easily broken.
There’s a process of selective memory too. After all, Erdoğan’s first terms in power were considered successful. And even if people are doing badly economically now, they remember the past. “There are two times in my life when I was rich”, electors tell Gümüşçü, “with Özal [a Turkish leader in the 1990s] and with Tayyip Erdoğan”. These are personal memories: when someone got the deeds to their first house, when they bought a car. They matter.
And then there’s the fear, the worry that if people gave up on the AKP Turkey would turn into Syria. The AKP has been rhetorically eliding the CHP opposition party with Kurdish PKK terrorism for years as ‘CHPKK’. (Though more recently the AKP has been trying to conduct a U-turn on the Kurds (if not the PKK): “so fast that they will go off the road and almost fall off a cliff”, Gümüşçü notes).
Despite this, she remains optimistic as to the future. The public outcry since March 19 has changed her sense of where things are going: from a 3/10 likelihood democracy will win out to 6-7/10. But the opposition mustn’t lose momentum. “This is not about being on the streets all the time” – at least not only that. They need to demonstrate there is still hope, not to despair. The regime will try to derail the popular movement: “putting provocateurs inside, starting fights within the opposition, creating chaos among the masses”. The opposition must remain calm, determined, rational.
That way, perhaps Turkey can exit authoritarianism now – (just) before it’s too late.
Original interview conducted by Ayşe Karabat and Semin Gümüşel, published in Turkish under the title ‘Siyaset bilimci Şebnem Gümüşçü: “Ya tam otokrasi ya demokrasi, geri dönüşü olmayan bir yol ayrımındayız”’, on 3 April 2025.
It’s available here.
Fayn studio is an independent Turkish media outlet.
