On December 17, a court struck down the protest bans imposed after the arrest of Istanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu back in March. Weeks earlier, prosecutors had finalized an indictment meant to keep İmamoğlu, the leading opposition figure, jailed indefinitely. Together they show a system under strain, making parallel use of repression and legal tactics to entrench its control.

Turkey is now a frontline case of lawfare: the weaponized use of the judiciary to political ends. If the jailing of Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva revealed the damage that lawfare can do to the democratic process, Turkey shows how far it can go in hardening authoritarian rule. Left unchecked, it will not remain an exception but set a precedent for attacks on democracy elsewhere.

The Lula blueprint is now being reproduced against İmamoğlu, the center-left challenger to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, in a harsher authoritarian setting. In today’s Turkey, lawfare has expanded beyond a way of managing the opposition into a means of recalibrating the state itself.