On the morning of July 16, 2016, roughly twelve hours after a faction of the Turkish military launched tanks into the streets of Istanbul and Ankara, after fighter jets bombed the parliament building, after the coup collapsed under popular resistance and the soldiers who had mutinied were being photographed lying face down on the pavement, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan stepped before a microphone and called what had just happened a gift from God. The remark was widely reported. It was also entirely accurate. In the eight years that followed, Erdoğan would use the failed coup as the legal, political, and moral foundation for the most comprehensive restructuring of a modern democratic state in recent memory, not in the direction of democracy, but away from it.

What makes Turkey analytically distinct from both Russia and Hungary is the role of the emergency. Russia's surveillance state was built layer by layer, law by law, across a decade, under the stable cover of child-protection framing. Hungary's was built under the cover of a normal parliamentary majority that happened to cross a constitutional supermajority threshold. Turkey's was built in the space of twenty-four months, under a declared state of emergency, by a government governing by decree with the force of law. The architecture was already under construction before July 2016. The coup attempt gave Erdoğan the permission structure to finish it.

The Architecture of Consolidation

The original article carries an interactive timeline and an Authoritarian Drift Index chart. Substack strips embedded scripts, so the table below preserves the same key moments as a fallback.

Year Moment What it added
2002 AKP wins landslide Erdoğan begins as reformer pursuing EU accession.
2013 Gezi Park protests Government response marks the authoritarian pivot.
2016 Failed coup, state of emergency 125,000+ purged from public service; rule by decree.
2017 Constitutional referendum Parliamentary system abolished; hyper-presidency installed.
2018 Freedom House: "Not Free" Turkey's democratic downgrade is formalized.
2025 İmamoğlu arrested Biggest protests since Gezi; competitive authoritarianism ends.

2002: The Reformer Who Wasn't

AKP's EU Accession Years, Reform as Prelude

The Turkey that elected the Justice and Development Party in November 2002 was a country emerging from a brutal economic crisis, exhausted by decades of coalition instability, and cautiously optimistic about EU membership. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was then an Islamist-rooted politician with a recent prison sentence behind him (he had served four months in 1999 for reciting a nationalist-religious poem at a rally) and an unusual coalition under him, combining religious conservatives, liberal technocrats, and Kurdish voters who saw in the AKP a way past the Kemalist military-judicial establishment that had long excluded them.

In his first years in office, Erdoğan was a reformer in a substantive sense. Economic stabilization measures produced sustained growth. Laws were amended to meet EU accession criteria. The death penalty was abolished. Kurdish-language broadcasting was legalized for the first time. The political influence of the military, which had intervened in Turkish politics in 1960, 1971, 1980, and "post-modernly" in 1997, was reduced by a combination of legal reforms and trials targeting Kemalist military officers. The story the AKP told about itself in this period, that it was the vehicle for completing Turkey's democratic transition, was not entirely false.

The Ergenekon Trials. Between 2008 and 2013, a series of trials known as Ergenekon and Balyoz expelled 254 military officers from service and sentenced 325 more (along with businessmen, journalists, and civil servants) to long prison terms, on charges of plotting coups against the AKP government. The prosecutors leading these trials were, in substantial part, members of the Gülen movement, whose supporters had quietly infiltrated the judiciary, police, and civil service. In 2016, the Supreme Court found much of the evidence had been fabricated. But by then the trials had done their work: the military was neutered as an institutional check on the executive.

What the reformer narrative obscured was what was happening underneath it. The AKP's first decade was also the decade of the Gülen alliance: a partnership between Erdoğan's party and the transnational religious movement led by US-based cleric Fethullah Gülen, whose followers were building a quiet institutional empire inside the Turkish state. The collaboration served both parties. The AKP got help dismantling the Kemalist establishment. The Gülenists got state power to build a parallel network across the civil service, the judiciary, and especially the police. This arrangement would eventually produce one of the most consequential political divorces in modern Turkish history. For now, it produced efficiency.

2013: The Turn Becomes Visible

Gezi, Corruption Investigations, and the Break with Gülen

In late May 2013, a small group of activists occupied Gezi Park in central Istanbul to protest its planned redevelopment into a shopping mall. The police response (tear gas, water cannons, dawn raids) was disproportionate enough to transform a local environmental protest into a nationwide uprising. Within days, millions of people were on the streets in more than eighty cities. The demands had expanded well beyond the park. What the protesters were expressing was accumulated resentment at a governing style that had become, in ways that had not been fully visible before, authoritarian.

Erdoğan's response to Gezi set the tone for what would follow. The protesters were denounced as "looters." Foreign conspirators were blamed. Police killed five people and injured more than eight thousand. The Turkish media, large portions of which were already under indirect government pressure through ownership changes and regulatory intimidation, largely declined to cover the protests at all; some major television networks broadcast documentaries about penguins while demonstrations filled the streets outside their studios. Gezi was the moment the authoritarian turn became legible to the Turkish middle class that had until then given the AKP the benefit of the doubt.

Under President Erdoğan and his ruling party, Turkey became the prime example of democratic backsliding in the modern state. In the early days of Erdoğan in office as Prime Minister, he was actually known for being progressive, but he came to see institutions as impediments and turned ever more authoritarian.

Democratic Erosion Consortium analysis

The second rupture of 2013 came from inside the state. In December of that year, prosecutors (many of them aligned with the Gülen movement) launched a corruption investigation that named the sons of four government ministers and implicated Erdoğan's inner circle. Leaked audio recordings appeared online in which a voice identified as Erdoğan's appeared to instruct his son to move millions of euros out of multiple houses ahead of an impending police raid. Erdoğan denounced the recordings as fabrications, characterized the investigation as a "judicial coup," and began the systematic purge of Gülen-aligned prosecutors, judges, and police officers from their positions.

The split with Gülen was formalized over the following months. The AKP-controlled parliament passed legislation bringing the Supreme Board of Judges and Prosecutors under tighter executive control. Prosecutors were reassigned. Police officers who had participated in the corruption raids were transferred or fired. A new category of internal enemy, the "parallel state" or "FETÖ," the Fethullahist Terrorist Organization, was constructed to describe what had been, a year earlier, a governing ally. Umberto Eco's mobilizing passions were visible, clearly, in the speed of the transformation: the enemy was simultaneously too weak to be legitimate and too strong to be ignored. The vocabulary was being standardized. The targets were being identified. The infrastructure for what followed was being pre-positioned.

2016: A Gift from God

The Coup Attempt and the State of Emergency

On the night of July 15, 2016, elements of the Turkish military moved on Istanbul and Ankara. Tanks blocked the Bosphorus Bridge. Fighter jets buzzed the presidential palace and bombed the parliament building. By dawn the coup had failed, defeated by a combination of loyalist military units, police, and ordinary civilians who flooded into the streets after Erdoğan, reached on a FaceTime call, urged resistance via a mobile phone held up to a television camera. More than three hundred people were killed. By some accounts, the coup attempt was remarkably incompetent, rushed into action hours ahead of schedule after the plotters realized the government had been tipped off. By all accounts, it shocked the country to its foundations.

The government's response was faster than the coup itself. By the morning of July 16, before the last pockets of resistance had been fully subdued, arrest lists that could not possibly have been assembled in the hours since the coup began were already being executed across eighty-one provinces. 2,745 judges were dismissed and detained within twenty-four hours. Within five days, 45,000 military officials, police officers, judges, governors, and civil servants had been arrested or suspended. The president of every university in Turkey was forced to resign. The speed and organization of the response made clear what independent investigators later confirmed: the lists had been prepared in advance. Some of the judges fired had been working in cities they no longer worked in. One prosecutor on the firing list had been dead for 57 days.

State of Emergency: Emergency Decree Powers

Declared July 20, 2016; extended seven times; in force until July 2018, two full years.

Rule by decree. The president and cabinet were empowered to issue Decrees with the Force of Law (KHK) on any subject, bypassing parliament entirely. More than thirty such decrees were issued during the emergency period.

Permanent discharge without appeal. The decrees permitted the permanent dismissal of judges, prosecutors, and civil servants with no investigation, no hearing, and no possibility of legal challenge.

Extended detention. Suspects could be held for up to 30 days without being brought before a judge, and denied access to a lawyer for up to five days.

Institutional closure by decree. Schools, hospitals, universities, media outlets, and associations could be closed without due process. More than 2,000 educational institutions and 186 media outlets were shuttered this way.

The scope of the post-coup purge was unprecedented in modern democratic history. By the time the state of emergency was lifted in July 2018, at least 125,000 civil servants, military personnel, and academics had been sacked or suspended. More than 50,000 had been formally arrested. 4,000 judges and prosecutors had been removed from their posts, roughly a third of the Turkish judiciary. 186 media outlets were shut down. At least 140 journalists were jailed, giving Turkey the distinction, by 2017, of having more journalists imprisoned than any other country in the world. The Wikipedia article was blocked from April 2017 until January 2020. Over 11,000 Kurdish teachers were dismissed; dozens of elected pro-Kurdish mayors were removed from office and replaced with government appointees called "trustees."

More than 40,000 people have been dismissed from their posts, including the forced resignation of the heads of every university in the country. The justice system has been particularly hard hit. The first emergency decree underscored its ambition to act without restraint: it orders the closure without any due process of thousands of private educational institutions, hospitals, clinics, and associations.

Human Rights Watch, on the first weeks of the post-coup purge, August 2016

The stated justification was the elimination of the Gülenist network that had organized the coup. The actual sweep went much further. Kurdish politicians, leftist academics, secularist journalists, human rights lawyers, and critics of the government who had no plausible connection to the Gülen movement were caught in the dragnet along with actual Gülenists. Possession of a book by Fethullah Gülen, widely sold in Turkish bookshops until 2014, was treated as evidence of membership in a terrorist organization. An app called ByLock, allegedly used by Gülenist operatives, became grounds for prosecution; thousands of people who appear never to have used it were charged anyway.

2017: The Constitutional Finish

The Referendum and the End of Parliamentary Turkey

On April 16, 2017, Turkish voters approved, by a margin of 51.4 to 48.6 percent, a package of eighteen constitutional amendments that fundamentally restructured the Turkish state. The office of prime minister was abolished. The parliamentary system, in place in some form since 1923, was replaced with a hyper-presidential system. The president was given the power to issue decrees with the force of law, appoint senior judges and officials without parliamentary review, dissolve parliament, declare states of emergency without judicial check, and (following an amendment that took immediate effect) simultaneously serve as leader of a political party while head of state. The formal separation of powers was, as a structural matter, terminated.

The Venice Commission of the Council of Europe, the body of European constitutional law experts that reviews proposed constitutional changes for member states, described the amendments as "a threat to democracy" and warned explicitly of "the dangers of degeneration of the proposed system towards an authoritarian and personal regime." International election monitors reported that the vote had not met international standards. The Supreme Electoral Council had, at the last minute, accepted unstamped ballots as valid: a procedural change widely understood to have benefited the "Yes" side. The referendum had been conducted, the Council noted pointedly, under a state of emergency, with over 130 journalists in jail, with the "No" campaign subject to police harassment, and with most major media effectively under government control.

What the 2017 Referendum Changed. Abolished the prime minister; concentrated executive power in the presidency; permitted the president to issue decrees with force of law on political, social, and economic matters; gave the president unilateral authority to appoint the majority of Supreme Board of Judges and Prosecutors members; allowed the president to dissolve parliament at will; permitted the president to serve as leader of a political party; extended the potential presidential term to 15 years. Ergun Özbudun, a leading Turkish constitutional scholar, described the result as "a kind of authoritarianism even beyond delegative democracies."

What the referendum did not change, at the formal level, was the continued existence of elections. Turkey would still hold presidential and parliamentary contests. The opposition would still be permitted to compete. On this point, the system Erdoğan built after 2017 differed from the one Putin was building in Russia: it preserved the outer form of electoral contestation while hollowing out the conditions under which contestation could be meaningful. The Levitsky-Way framework of "competitive authoritarianism" fit Turkey exactly from this point forward. Elections happened. The playing field was not level. Opposition politicians could, and did, win local races (İmamoğlu's shocking 2019 victory in Istanbul being the most consequential), but the cost of opposition was consistently borne by the opposition, not by the government.

Freedom House formalized the shift in 2018, downgrading Turkey's status from "Partly Free" to "Not Free," the first NATO member ever to be so classified in the modern Freedom in the World index. The V-Dem Liberal Democracy Index scores for Turkey were in free fall through this period, with the sharpest drops registering on dimensions of judicial independence, press freedom, and civil society autonomy. What had been, in 2005, one of the region's more promising democracies was, by the end of the 2010s, widely classified among political scientists as an electoral autocracy.

2019 to 2024: The Competitive Authoritarian Equilibrium

Elections That Happen, Oppositions That Cannot Fully Win

For the second half of the 2010s and the first half of the 2020s, Turkey settled into the distinctive equilibrium that Levitsky and Way had theorized as competitive authoritarianism. Elections happened on schedule. The opposition was legal. In March 2019, the combined opposition won the Istanbul mayoralty, Erdoğan's own political birthplace, on a candidate, Ekrem İmamoğlu, who had been an obscure district mayor a year earlier. The government annulled the result. A court-ordered re-run took place on June 23. İmamoğlu won again, this time by a much larger margin. Millions of Turks drew a line from this to the possibility of future change, and for a few years, competitive authoritarianism felt less stable than it had.

What it did not feel was fair. In the years between 2019 and 2024, Turkey's opposition mayors faced continuous legal harassment. State funds were systematically redirected toward AKP-controlled municipalities. Television coverage of government rallies dwarfed coverage of the opposition by orders of magnitude. Selahattin Demirtaş, the Kurdish politician who had been the most effective opposition leader of the 2010s, had been imprisoned since 2016 on charges the European Court of Human Rights repeatedly ruled to be politically motivated, rulings Turkey continued to ignore. The 2023 presidential election, which opposition polls in the weeks leading up to the vote suggested Erdoğan was likely to lose, ended with him winning a runoff against Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu by 52.18 percent. The result was not obviously fraudulent. The terrain was not even close to level.

In a country that isn't a democracy, when you win a lawsuit, you still lose if it's against the government, because they find other ways to bully or to inflict pain.

Erica Chenoweth, on the experience of contesting competitive authoritarian systems

What defined the period was the accumulation of state weapons available against named opponents. Tax audits. Regulatory investigations. Corruption charges. Terrorism designations extended to loosely defined networks. The combined effect was to make opposition not illegal, but costly. Most citizens rationally chose not to pay the cost. The ones who did (journalists like Can Dündar, politicians like Demirtaş, mayors like Kurdish Diyarbakır's Gültan Kışanak, all of whom spent years in prison) became case studies in what the alternative looked like. The electoral form survived. The civic substance was hollowed out.

2025: The Line Is Crossed

İmamoğlu's Arrest and the End of Competitive Contestation

On March 18, 2025, Istanbul University announced it was annulling Ekrem İmamoğlu's university degree on the grounds of procedural irregularities in his 1990 transfer from a Turkish Cypriot institution. Under Turkish election law, presidential candidates must hold a university degree. The announcement came days before the Republican People's Party (the CHP, Turkey's main opposition) was scheduled to formally nominate him as its candidate for the 2028 presidential election. The following day, March 19, Turkish police raided İmamoğlu's home at dawn. He was arrested on charges of corruption, bribery, extortion, money laundering, and supporting terrorism. A court would dismiss the terrorism charge within days; the rest remained.

What followed was the largest wave of protests Turkey had seen since Gezi, and in several important respects larger and more sustained. Hundreds of thousands of people filled the streets of Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir, night after night, for weeks. The CHP held a symbolic primary election two days after the arrest; over 15 million Turks participated in what the party called an open vote on İmamoğlu's candidacy. The government responded with force: 1,900 people were detained in the first ten days, including dozens of journalists. X, the social media platform, complied with government orders to suspend approximately 700 accounts, the majority of which belonged to student activists sharing protest information.

The Cascade After İmamoğlu. Following İmamoğlu's arrest, a systematic pattern of actions was taken against CHP mayors and municipalities throughout 2025: multiple district mayors in Istanbul arrested on corruption charges (March 23); major media conglomerate Can Holding's television properties (Haberturk, Show TV, Bloomberg HT) seized (September 11); pro-opposition channel Tele1 placed under a state-appointed trustee (October 24); new charges of "political espionage" filed against İmamoğlu (October 27). The Council of Europe condemned the arrest as politically motivated. The arrest marked the moment observers widely described Turkey as crossing from competitive authoritarianism into something harder.

The analytical significance of the İmamoğlu arrest, as noted by comparative politics scholars in the weeks following, was that it represented the moment when the competitive part of competitive authoritarianism could no longer be credibly maintained. Erdoğan's government had, across fifteen years, used the tools of the state to disadvantage the opposition. What it had not done, at least at the level of a major national opposition figure with a realistic path to the presidency, was simply imprison them before they could compete. The line between "unfair election in which the opposition is systematically disadvantaged" and "managed election in which the opposition is systematically prevented from competing at all" is the line Levitsky, Way, and Ziblatt use to distinguish competitive authoritarianism from full electoral autocracy. İmamoğlu's arrest was widely read as a test of whether that line would hold. By late 2025, with İmamoğlu still imprisoned and facing fresh "espionage" charges, it had not.

The Emergency Template

Russia's authoritarian turn was sequenced. Hungary's was structural. Turkey's was compressed: the product of a years-long backsliding trajectory that was then accelerated into its final form by the legal and political infrastructure of a two-year state of emergency. For comparative purposes this is the most instructive of the three cases, because it illustrates what an emergency actually does in a political system already drifting toward authoritarianism. It does not create the drift. It removes the procedural obstacles that have been slowing it down.

The pre-coup Turkey of 2013 to 2016 was already a country with a captured press, a weakened judiciary, an imprisoned opposition, and a leader who routinely described his opponents in the language of treason. What it did not have was a legal permission structure for acting on all of that simultaneously. The July 2016 emergency provided that permission structure. Rule by decree replaced legislative deliberation for two years. Permanent dismissals replaced due-process review. The purge of the judiciary and civil service, which would have required years of individual legal challenges to accomplish through ordinary means, was accomplished in weeks, irreversibly. The 2017 referendum then constitutionalized what the emergency had delivered in practice. The emergency did not have to be extended indefinitely. It only had to last long enough to install the architecture that would replace it.

To me, on a scale of illiberalism, it's worse than Hungary and better than Russia. Yes, Turkey is authoritarian, but it also has a robust, organized, and energized opposition. That's neither the case in Russia nor Iran.

Aslı Aydıntaşbaş, Brookings Turkey Project, December 2025

What makes the Turkish case particularly relevant to the broader comparative project is the role played by the alignment between the state and a subordinate institutional ecosystem: the Gülen movement before 2013, and a realigned pro-AKP business and media class afterward. The early AKP consolidated power in partnership with a distributed, quasi-independent institutional network it did not fully control. When that network became a threat, it was destroyed. What replaced it was a tighter configuration: media conglomerates, construction firms, and state-adjacent businesses whose continued viability depended directly on government favor, and whose leadership understood that dependence explicitly. The transition from ambient alignment to contractual alignment is a distinctive feature of the Turkish case. It is also the feature most worth watching elsewhere.

The question posed by the 2025 İmamoğlu arrest, still unresolved at the time of writing, is whether Turkey's competitive authoritarian equilibrium has given way to something harder: an equilibrium in which elections continue to be held but meaningful opposition candidates are systematically prevented from appearing on ballots. The Democratic Erosion Consortium and Brookings Turkey analysts have been clear about what they see: the arrest itself was a qualitative break, and the subsequent pattern (seizing opposition media, jailing opposition mayors, charging İmamoğlu with successively more serious crimes) points toward consolidation rather than retreat. Whether the protests that followed amount to the beginning of a reversal, or the last visible expression of a political space that is closing, remains the open question.

For now, what Turkey contains is a template. A model for how an emergency, legally declared in response to a genuine national crisis, can be used to compress a decade of consolidation into a two-year window. A model for how the formal architecture of democracy (elections, constitutional courts, parliaments) can be preserved while the conditions under which those institutions functioned are comprehensively eliminated. A model for how to call a disaster a gift, and mean it.

Sources & Further Reading

Part of a series on how surveillance and authoritarian infrastructure is assembled in democratic and semi-democratic contexts. See also, in reading order: The Blacklist Machine: How Russia Built a Surveillance State, The Gavel, Not the Gun: How Viktor Orbán Dismantled Hungary's Democracy, The Autocracy Ratchet: Scoring America's Democratic Erosion Quarter by Quarter, The Permission Slip: Palantir's Manifesto and the Architecture Already in Place, The Receipt You Didn't Sign: FISA, Data Brokers, and AI, Protect the Children: The Global Surveillance Playbook, Child Safety as a Backdoor to the Surveillance State.