The detention of Ekrem İmamoğlu, Istanbul’s mayor and the opposition’s leading contender for the 2028 presidential elections, marks a turning point in Turkey’s descent into full autocracy. Although the country formally transitioned to a one-man regime in 2017 that entirely abolished the separation of powers and rendered parliament functionally irrelevant, elections have continued to function within a legal framework that preserved a veneer of legitimacy.

Now with the candidacy of İmamoğlu — who is widely regarded as Erdoğan’s strongest potential challenger in 2028 — being eliminated through judicial means, Turkey has entered a new phase in which elections will be little more than a ritualistic performance. In this sense, the country has now joined the ranks of Belarus, Russia, and Venezuela.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s vision for Turkey rests on the ideal of a monolithic society, restructured along the lines of political Islam, where all dissent is either crushed or rendered inconsequential. Today little remains to stand in his way. The first phase of the Islamist transformation, which has unfolded over the past two decades, began with the purge of the civilian and military representatives of the ancien régime through show trials such as the Ergenekon case and Balyoz (“Operation Sledgehammer”), fabricated on bogus evidence.

During this period, Erdoğan secured the support of certain left-wing and liberal circles in Turkey by portraying himself as a challenger to military tutelage. He also gained the backing of Western governments by enacting legal reforms aimed at aligning Turkey with European Union democratic norms, successfully framing his struggle as a fight for democracy.

At this stage, he relied on prosecutors and judges linked to the Fethullah Gülen movement to orchestrate politically motivated trials and, through the 2010 constitutional referendum, ensured that the high judiciary fell under their control. After consolidating power, however, he turned against the Gülenist network, using the 2013 corruption scandal as a pretext to purge them from state institutions.

The 2013 Gezi Park protests marked a turning point in Erdoğan’s approach to the opposition. Previously he had presented himself as a more conciliatory and moderate leader, or at least maintained that appearance in his rhetoric. After the Gezi protests, he adopted a deeply polarizing discourse and political strategy, fueling divisions within society and escalating his crackdown on dissent. Following his election as president in 2014, he openly disregarded the constitutional constraints, ruling as a de facto party leader despite the presidency’s nonpartisan status under the legal framework at the time.

These were critical junctures in Turkey’s political trajectory, but Erdoğan’s most decisive opportunity came with the 2016 coup attempt led by Gülenist officers. In the aftermath of the failed coup, Turkey’s entire public administration was overhauled. Thousands of people, including judges and prosecutors, were arrested, while tens of thousands of public servants were dismissed and stripped of their passports under the two-year-long state of emergency that followed.

The legal Kurdish political movement, organized around the Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), which had opposed Erdoğan’s transition to a presidential system, was also targeted. Selahattin Demirtaş, the movement’s leader, was imprisoned along with numerous Kurdish politicians — and most remain behind bars to this day. The practice of appointing government trustees in place of elected officials, initially introduced to seize Gülenist media outlets, was soon extended to municipalities.

Meanwhile, Erdoğan forged an alliance with the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). As part of this arrangement, the party congress won by Meral Akşener was annulled in 2016, and MHP was handed back to its longtime leader, Devlet Bahçeli. During these years, Turkey drifted further away from the Western bloc, purchasing weapons and air defense systems from Russia in alignment with Vladimir Putin’s strategy of creating fractures within NATO.

Following the 2017 referendum that cemented Turkey’s transition to a presidential system, two political figures emerged as major challengers to Erdoğan’s rule, having dealt his Justice and Development Party (AKP) crushing defeats in the 2019 and 2024 local elections: Ankara mayor Mansur Yavaş and Istanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu. Among the two, İmamoğlu emerged as Erdoğan’s most formidable political rival, distinguished by his powerful oratory skills, his populist charisma, and his exceptional ability to galvanize mass support. He was widely expected to challenge Erdoğan in the 2028 presidential election and was seen as the most viable candidate to unseat him. However, by orchestrating İmamoğlu’s removal from the political stage, Erdoğan has sent an unequivocal message: just like Putin, Nicolás Maduro, and Aleksandr Lukashenko before him, he will never enter an election he risks losing.

The Erdoğan administration’s ambitions may not stop at eliminating İmamoğlu. The action appears poised to launch a broader crackdown on secular journalists and artists — groups that have until now been largely spared from the judiciary’s repressive grip. The Republican People’s Party (CHP), now led by İmamoğlu and Özgür Özel following Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu’s decline in popularity after losing the 2023 presidential elections, may face systematic marginalization, eventually being reduced to a hollow shell to facilitate Erdoğan’s vision of a monolithic Islamic society.

With global politics increasingly shaped by authoritarian figures like Donald Trump, Putin, and Benjamin Netanyahu and Europe preoccupied with its internal crises, Erdoğan’s autocratic ambitions face fewer obstacles than ever. Despite the opposition’s efforts to inspire hope, Turkey faces extraordinarily dark days ahead and a new phase in which even the semblance of democratic competition may soon disappear entirely.