Turkey's never-ending tail

Yet another Rubicon crossed in Turkey's endless democratic backsliding

Last year, the American reading public learned an unpleasant new concept: competitive authoritarianism. Like many Turkey-watchers, I had flashbacks to a decade earlier when I’d been obliged to learn the same term.

As someone raised on nineties dad movies, here’s how I always explain it: in the penultimate scene of Gladiator, the usurper Emperor Commodus stages a public battle between himself and Maximus after surreptitiously inflicting a mortal wound to secure a decisive advantage.

The reasons not to fight him fairly are obvious, but why not just kill him outright or lock him up forever? Because even a dictator’s power rests in part on popular legitimacy. If Commodus ‘defeats’ Maximus in a public spectacle with at least the trappings of fairness, he plausibly maintains a veneer of legitimacy, adds to his personal mythos, destroys his opponent’s prestige, and demoralizes his rival’s supporters.

This is competitive authoritarianism. You hobble and ‘defeat’ your opponent on an unfair playing field rather than simply imprisoning or killing him. It’s not a dictatorship, but not quite a democracy. But wait a moment, you might be asking, Maximus still won. And challengers can still triumph even in an unfair arena if they’re sufficiently popular and effective; just look at Péter Magyar’s recent landslide victory in Hungary. Just because someone is cheating against you doesn’t mean you can’t still beat them, and just because you do beat them, it doesn’t mean it was a fair fight all along (right Ross Douthat?). The system is still competitive, it’s just tilted towards one side.

Competitive authoritarianism can be seen as halfway to consolidated autocracy, but another way of looking at it is as a more sophisticated, confident form of authoritarian rule hiding under the pretense of democracy. It combines the tools of oppression with the seeming legitimacy of elections and independent opposition parties. Being able to campaign gives the opposition an outlet for their frustrations and a frisson of hope. Foreign leaders congratulate the autocrat on winning an election, bolstering their legitimacy. The opposition appears as sore losers if they complain about an uneven playing field, and are derided for their incompetence, even by their own supporters. Nobody likes a loser.

As democracy expert Michael Meyer-Resende wrote following the first round of Turkey’s 2023 elections:

Read the international media since election day and you get the point: Erdoğan, the great campaigner, and his party, the AKP, still enjoy genuine and broad-based support. The opposition was disappointingly weak and picked the wrong presidential candidate…In the essential battle for national and international public opinion, these views and explanations are gold dust for perceptions of Erdogan’s legitimacy.

Erdoğan is a genuinely gifted politician with consistently broad support, but how much of his popularity comes from every major news outlet fawning over him, state resources used to reward his supporters and punish his opponents, the judiciary concocting corruption charges against his competitors, and security services intimidating his enemies.

Lance Armstrong was a gifted athlete, but he was also a cheater, and we’ll never know exactly how much of his success was due to doping. Even if he could have had as many wins without it, does that make him any less culpable? He cheated.

But what if Commodus hadn’t been so blinded by his own arrogance and realized that even a wounded Maximus would likely defeat him in battle? He might have just cut his losses and had his opponent executed or locked away forever, losing some legitimacy but saving his own skin.

That’s exactly what Turkish President Erdoğan is doing now. With the economy in a nosedive since 2018 and the cost of living out of control, Erdoğan is no longer able to maintain his grip on power by merely skewing the political playing field through his control of the state, courts, media and much of the economy.

The opposition’s most popular politicians began outpolling Erdoğan in 2021, and the largest opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP) began outperforming Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) starting with the 2024 local elections. Erdoğan hasn’t been confident in winning a fair fight for well over a decade, but now he’s not even convinced he can win an unfair fight. That’s why he arrested leading opposition politician and Istanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu last year, and is now ousting the leadership of the CHP, the republic’s founding party.

Erdoğan isn’t so ham-fisted as to simply shut down the rival party. He uses the ‘independent’ judicial system to conjure up corruption charges, declare the CHP’s 2023 internal elections invalid, and install his own preferred collaborator, who has almost no support among the population. Why destroy a popular political party when you can turn it into your lapdog? Then you can either parade it around as your obedient ‘democratic opposition,’ or simply sit back and watch it collapse while you tut-tut. This vampirization of political parties, news outlets, or even sacred spaces is familiar in Turkish politics.

With these recent developments, Turkey exits competitive authoritarianism, but doesn’t quite enter fully consolidated dictatorship. It’s now what political scientists call a hegemonic authoritarian system, where opposition parties exist but are effectively controlled by the regime. Elections still occur in such a system, but they’re no longer competitive.

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As a Turkey-watcher, it’s hard convincing people abroad that they should spend their increasingly exhausted attention on yet another Rubicon crossed in Turkey’s never-ending descent into ever deeper authoritarianism. Despite early reforms and honeyed blandishments about democracy and tolerance in the early 2000s, the AKP began quietly consolidating its control and attacking its opponents soon after it came to power in 2002, and Erdoğan began cementing his own power over the party until it became his personal vanity project.

According to Freedom House data, freedom of expression and political pluralism indicators began falling in 2007 and 2008, respectively. In 2013, Erdoğan brutally crushed the massive Gezi protests, and the rest of the world finally began to catch on to what kind of a leader he is. By 2015, Turkey was the most illiberal democracy in the world, and democracy scholars contended that the country no longer met the standards of democracy at all. In 2016, during a two-year state of emergency, Erdoğan had the entire leadership of the major pro-Kurdish party arrested and dozens of their elected politicians replaced with state officials. In 2018, following an incredibly dodgy referendum, a new presidential system removed most checks to Erdoğan’s power, effectively rendering permanent his emergency powers of decree. During this time, academics already began writing about Turkey’s lurch towards hegemonic authoritarianism.

Democratic backsliding has a tail which seems never to end, and the casual observer from abroad can be forgiven for not following in detail the various gradations towards dictatorship, and for having given up on Turkey’s embattled opposition.

The sad fact is, there’s no easy way to resist an autocrat who’s willing to simply imprison his opponents. Péter Magyar ran a very effective campaign in Hungary, and that worked in a country where the incumbent was constrained by EU democratic safeguards, but what if Orbán could simply have had his opponent arrested? Mass protests for a while, a surge in opposition support, and then what? The government arrests you, shoots you, poisons you, or sometimes most effectively, simply ignores you. Selahattin Demirtaş and İmamoğlu were committed, principled, and extraordinarily talented politicians, and now they’re rotting in jail with scores of other prisoners of conscience. Massive protests following İmamoğlu’s arrest eventually fizzled out.

But Erdoğan’s increasingly vicious suppression of the opposition comes not from strength and confidence, but weakness and fear. He’s out of touch, out of energy, and has no fresh ideas beyond further repression.

Meanwhile, Turkey’s opposition, despite repeated missteps, has in recent years shown itself to be organized, determined, and full of bright talents. Unlike in countries with little or no tradition of competitive elections, Turks have proven unwilling to give up on democracy time and again. Legions of young people take to the streets in the face of brutal police violence, displaying creativity and humour. Turks vote in astonishing numbers, and opposition politicians have marched across the country and into war-torn cities, and slept with voting ballots to prevent tampering.

The problem that most despots eventually run into is that personalist regimes are ineffective at governance and unstable. Institutions are hollowed out, autocrats fall out of touch and surround themselves with yes-men, and the economy eventually falters. Over the past decade and more, I’ve watched not only the Turkish economy crash, but the physical destruction of the country I fell in love with two decades ago. Soaring incompetence and corruption led to unnecessary earthquake destruction, mining disasters, accidents, flooding, wildfires, pollution, war-torn cities, and gentrification (did I mention pollution?).

When these regimes eventually collapse, it usually isn’t pretty. Erdoğan’s rule may be secured for now, but Turkey edges ever closer to a precipice over which no one knows what awaits.