On November 4, 2016, members of parliament from the Turkish opposition were rounded up in a series of nighttime raids as Erdoğan’s increasingly authoritarian government made its long-anticipated move against the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP).

The previous year the HDP — a party formed by Kurdish and leftist groups — had twice embarrassed the Erdoğan government, polling over five million in successive elections to establish themselves as a serious force in parliament. July 2016’s failed coup provided a pretext to deal with this problem. The party was criminalized in a crackdown which, one year on, sees nine MPs, eighty-five mayors, and around eight thousand HDP activists in Turkish prisons.

In April, the AKP government narrowly won a referendum granting sweeping powers to President Erdoğan. The HDP — whose ascent to 13 percent in June 2015’s election had at first denied Erdoğan a parliamentary majority — will bear much of the brunt of this more effective repressive apparatus.