Last week, Turkey’s far-right regime launched a series of attacks on the opposition’s right to organize. Led by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), the fascist Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), and other ultranationalist and fascistic elements within the state, this all-out war on oppositional forces makes up part of a broader fascization process — one that is increasingly suppressing any democratic space in Turkey.

The crucial attacks started on Wednesday: first Ömer Faruk Gergerlioğlu, an MP for the leftist pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), had his parliamentary immunity removed, as he was charged with “propaganda for a terrorist organization.” All he had done was retweet news reports in 2016 that called upon the state and the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) to reach a peace agreement. A few hours later, it became known that one of the top state attorneys had initiated a Constitutional Court case demanding the dissolution of the HDP and a move to ban 687 of its leading figures from politics. This was again due to its alleged close ties with the PKK and failure to take a clear stance on “national issues.”

But there was more. On Friday, it became known that the area of Taksim Square and Gezi Park in Istanbul — a symbolic site for the Turkish left and the labor movement, famous internationally after 2013’s Gezi Uprising — has been taken from the opposition-controlled Istanbul city hall and set under the jurisdiction of the Directorate General of Foundations, under Erdoğan’s control. Then, in the middle of the night, a presidential decree declared that Turkey would withdraw from the Istanbul Convention — an international agreement on the fight against domestic violence, particularly against women and children.