Fully Authoritarian
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Population
HRF classifies Turkey as ruled by a fully authoritarian regime.
The modern Turkish state emerged in 1923. The Turkish National Movement, led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, fought a successful independence war (1919-1923), culminating in the Grand National Assembly’s proclamation of Turkey as a sovereign republic, with Ankara as the capital and Atatürk as its first president. He would hold this office until his death in 1938, driving sweeping modernization and secularization reforms that transformed nearly every aspect of governance, from public education to the civil service. While Turkey held free and fair elections starting in 1950, democratic consolidation stagnated, and the military organized a series of coups in the second half of the 20th century, ostensibly to uphold the country’s secular foundations.
In 2002, the Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP) won a landslide election victory. The party had pledged to uphold the secularist principles embedded in the constitution and pursue pragmatic economic policies and greater integration with the West. The AKP and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan have been in power since, overseeing the gradual, but systematic, dismantling of the country’s democratic checks and balances and the increasing persecution of the mainstream political opposition. This erosion intensified following a failed coup attempt in 2016, which the ruling party used as a pretext for sweeping purges within the military, civil service, academia, and media, and further executive aggrandizement.
Under the continuing rule of the AKP, electoral competition is significantly skewed to the point where the mainstream political opposition has an unlikely but realistic chance to win. Erdoğan’s regime has persecuted prominent members of the main opposition parties, the Republican People’s Party (CHP) and the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP) and its successor, Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM), under false pretenses of corruption or extremism. It has also obstructed their electoral campaigns and undermined independent electoral oversight. Despite such structural disadvantages, the mainstream opposition has made significant strides in recent years, increasing its nationwide results in the 2023 parliamentary elections and winning in major cities, such as Istanbul and Ankara, in the 2019 and 2024 local elections.
Independent media, political leaders, civil society leaders, organizations, and regular people face overt and systematic retaliation if they openly criticize or challenge the regime, particularly following the massive 2013 Gezi park protests and a failed 2016 coup (whose perpetrators have not been definitively identified as of 2025), attempting to topple Erdoğan and the AKP-led Parliament. Even pre-2016, Turkey frequently jailed critical journalists on bogus charges. However, the judicial persecution of dissidents worsened dramatically in the aftermath, with the country frequently ranking amongst the leading jailers of journalists worldwide. The regime has also shut down dozens of independent NGOs, seized the assets of critical media outlets and placed them under its control, and violently repressed dissenting protests. Its crackdown on dissenting journalists and members of the general public intensified in response to the outpour of public support for the mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem İmamoğlu, following his arrest in March 2025, with some estimates suggesting more than 2,000 individuals were arbitrarily detained for taking part in peaceful demonstrations condemning his persecution. Lastly, the regime has used its protracted armed conflict against the militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) as justification for its systemic discrimination against Kurds.
Turkish institutions largely fail to serve as independent checks on the regime. In 2017, Erdoğan initiated a successful referendum on transitioning to a super-presidential system, which, in turn, severely limited the operational effectiveness of the legislative and judicial branches. While the Constitutional Court has occasionally acted to check the AKP and President Erdoğan, the judiciary as a whole has largely enabled the regime’s attempts to skew the electoral playing fields in its favor and repress criticism. Turkish courts have routinely rubber-stamped the persecution of prominent opposition leaders and dissidents on bogus charges and censored critical media content.
In Turkey, electoral competition is significantly skewed to the point where the mainstream political opposition has an unlikely but realistic chance to win. The regime has systematically resorted to politically motivated legal action to disqualify viable challengers from competing in elections and hamper the mainstream opposition’s capacity to campaign. At the same time, the AKP has entrenched extensive clientelist networks in key industries by abusing state resources. Its cronies, in turn, have provided a number of unfair campaign advantages, notably disproportionate media coverage. Lastly, the ruling party has effectively captured the Supreme Election Council (YSK), thereby undermining independent electoral oversight.
The regime has systematically and unfairly barred real, mainstream opposition parties or candidates from competing in elections, largely through politically motivated judicial persecution. Under Turkish law, individuals convicted of “intentional crimes,” a category covering a broad range of offenses, are not eligible to run for public office for at least three years after the end of their sentences, possibly longer, depending on whether a court actively restores their candidacy rights. The regime abused this law to disqualify Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, a prominent member of the opposition CHP party, from potentially challenging Erdoğan in the upcoming presidential election, expected in 2028. In March 2025, İmamoğlu was arrested on bogus allegations, including embezzlement, espionage, and forgery of his university diploma. In November, after months in pre-trial detention (ongoing as of December 2025), İmamoğlu was charged with 142 offenses, the sentences for which could total more than 2,000 years in prison. At least 16 CHP members elected mayors in the critical 2024 local elections are also facing politically motivated trials, the outcomes of which will profoundly impact the party’s operational capacity. The pro-Kurdish HDP party (which was subsequently re-registered under different names to avoid persecution) has also been systematically targeted. Its leaders, Selahattin Demirtaş and Figen Yüksekdağ, have been imprisoned since 2016 on bogus terrorism charges due to their alleged links to the militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). The PKK was designated as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the US, and the EU, among others, for its sustained armed struggle against the Turkish military and attacks on civilian targets in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s. The case was based almost entirely on political speeches by the two politicians, with no material evidence that they aided or abetted the PKK. The ECtHR found the convictions to be entirely politically motivated in a series of rulings between 2018 and 2022, which also called for Demirtaş’s and Yüksekdağ’s immediate release. Despite the ECtHR’s binding decisions, a domestic court sentenced the two leaders to lengthy prison terms in 2024, 42 and 30 years, respectively. The regime is also pursuing a lawsuit, still under review as of December 2025, to dissolve the HDP and ban more than 400 members from holding public office. In addition, in January 2023, the Constitutional Court ruled to freeze the party’s assets just months ahead of the 2023 parliamentary elections. While the court subsequently reversed course and lifted the measure in March 2023, international observers noted the nearly two-month lapse severely undermined the HDP’s capacity to campaign.
In addition to obstructing the mainstream opposition, the regime has systematically enjoyed significant and unfair campaign advantages, largely by abusing public resources to cultivate a loyal business class. These non-state actors have, in turn, systematically contributed to skewing the playing field in the AKP’s favor. The mechanisms underpinning this symbiosis vary, from punitive tax audits meted against independent businesses to lucrative public tenders and large loans with favorable conditions awarded to the regime’s cronies. Campaign finance loopholes and poor oversight mechanisms have, in turn, allowed these regime allies to boost the AKP’s electoral campaigns through generous campaign contributions or pro-regime media coverage in affiliate outlets. During its 20-year rule, the party amended the Public Procurement Law (PPL) more than 150 times and awarded the majority of public tenders to loyal firms. A 2013 corruption scandal in which local media revealed that senior AKP officials had incentivized several allied businesses to purchase the popular Turkuvaz media group by promising they would win big public tenders epitomized these dynamics. Equally important, those implicated evaded accountability: the regime-controlled prosecution discontinued its investigation into the respective businesses for fraud, tax evasion, and bribery, while law enforcement suppressed peaceful protests denouncing officials’ role in the scandal. As the 20 or so corporations that get the lion’s share of tenders also have vested interests in and strong editorial influence over multiple media outlets, they have directly contributed to the AKP’s overwhelming advantages in political media coverage. To illustrate, in the 2023 presidential and parliamentary elections, the OSCE also found impartial coverage of the campaign was essentially non-existent: the People’s Alliance, led by the AKP, featured in about 50% of all political news, portrayed mostly positively. By contrast, the opposition coalition appeared in less than 30%, cast in an overwhelmingly negative tone.
By effectively capturing the Supreme Election Council (YSK), the regime has systematically undermined independent electoral oversight to such an extent that the outcomes of legitimate elections have been effectively voided on arbitrary grounds. The council’s members, judges appointed on the basis of opaque criteria by largely AKP-dominated judicial bodies, have demonstrated bias in favor of the ruling party in a number of dubious decisions. In the 2019 local elections, the YSK ruled that 23 democratically elected mayors-elect from the pro-Kurdish HDP party could not take up their positions, as they had been previously dismissed from public office. The majority of these candidates had been dismissed in the aftermath of the 2016 coup attempt on bogus charges of supporting the PKK’s terrorist activities. The regime replaced these democratically elected representatives with “trustees” loyal to the ruling party. In Istanbul, the YSK annulled the results of the local 2019 election after the AKP claimed, without credible supporting evidence, that the CHP candidate Ekrem İmamoğlu’s narrow victory resulted from systemic electoral fraud. These tactics backfired, however, as İmamoğlu not only won the re-run, but significantly increased his margin of victory to more than 700,000 votes. Notably, the YSK’s decisions are not subject to external legal review, contributing to the OSCE’s assessment that Turkey lacks adequate mechanisms for electoral dispute resolution.
Despite its overwhelming structural advantages and arbitrary attempts to hold on to power, the AKP has not won recent elections with a very high vote share. It has also refrained from perpetrating massive electoral fraud or overtly coercing members of the general public to vote for it. The regime’s increasingly slim margins of victory indicate elections are not yet a sham or façade. Multiple factors underpin its diminishing performance: while a significant portion of longtime AKP supporters, disaffected with its economic policies, have swung to other conservative Islamist parties, the CHP has led highly effective electoral campaigns in recent national and local elections, reaching even conservative strongholds outside the major metropolitan areas, and mobilized citizen observers to guarantee the integrity of the vote. As a result of all these factors, the regime lost ground in 2023, as Erdoğan barely won the presidential run-off with 52% of the votes, and the party’s performance dropped to 35.6%, the lowest since 2002, compared to the CHP’s 25.3%. In the 2024 local elections, the CHP won in most of the country’s large cities, including Istanbul, and also gained more votes nationwide than the ruling party.
Independent media, political leaders, civil society leaders, organizations, and regular people face overt and systematic retaliation if they openly criticize or challenge the regime, particularly following the unsuccessful 2016 coup attempt. The regime has relentlessly prosecuted dissenting journalists and civil society leaders under vague laws, engaged in overt online censorship, and consolidated effective editorial control over a large enough segment of the media sector to overwhelmingly bias coverage in its favor. Weaponizing the state of emergency in the aftermath of the 2016 coup attempt, the ruling party purged hundreds of independent civil society organizations and media outlets, disproportionately targeting those affiliated with the political opposition and minority groups. The regime has also violently suppressed and criminalized dissenting protests, notably during and after the watershed 2013 Gezi Park protests. Lastly, it has simultaneously engaged in and enabled transnational repression against dissidents, frequently abusing international institutions in the process.
The regime had systematically and seriously intimidated and obstructed the work of independent, dissenting media, civil society leaders, and members of the general public, predominantly through politically motivated legal action. Suspected or actual members of the Gülen movement, also known as Hizmet (a transnational Islamist movement the regime accused of orchestrating the 2016 coup without compelling evidence), frequently faced charges of “membership in a terrorist organization” or the vaguer “supporting a terrorist organization without being a member.” Journalists from a handful of critical publications, such as the dailies Cumhuriyet or Zaman, were also disproportionately targeted under the Anti-Terrorism law. Their judicial persecution escalated to such an extent that in 2016, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) named Turkey the world’s “worst jailer of journalists,” with 84 journalists arbitrarily imprisoned that year. Ali Akkuş, the editor of Zaman, was one of 25 journalists of the outlet detained in the immediate aftermath of the coup attempt and initially sentenced to lengthy prison terms (up to life imprisonment) for “membership in a terrorist organization.” While the Supreme Court of Appeals overturned some of these convictions, citing due process violations and ordered retrials, the new proceedings did not necessarily lead to eventual acquittal or protect defendants from disproportionately strict detention: journalists Ahmet Altan, Nazlı Ilıcak, and Fevzi Yazıcı spent between three and seven years behind bars as appeal proceedings dragged on. In February 2024, the Supreme Court of Appeals found them guilty of “aiding a terrorist organization without being a member” and sentenced them to prison terms between three and six years. The regime had been targeting journalists from Zaman and Cumhuriyet even prior to 2016. In November 2015, regime officials arrested Can Dündar and Erdem Gül, editor-in-chief and Ankara representative of Cumhuriyet, respectively, and charged them with espionage and membership in a terrorist organization. Shortly before, the newspaper had published a story, supported with video evidence, on the Turkish National Intelligence’s (MIT) arms shipments to extremist rebels in Syria (the regime had publicly denied such support before). The two men spent more than three months in pre-trial detention in the maximum-security Silivri Prison before they were released, awaiting trial. Dündar fled to Germany in 2016 but was tried in absentia and sentenced to 27 years’ imprisonment in 2020. In February 2024, the Istanbul 14th Heavy Penal Court sentenced Gül to five years’ imprisonment. Due in no small part to this systematic crackdown on independent outlets and dissenting journalists, the regime controls between 75% and 90% of the entire media sector and has abused this monopoly to bias coverage in its favor. The AKP unfairly benefits from overwhelmingly positive reporting, while the mainstream opposition is portrayed negatively nearly all the time, particularly during election campaigns.
Capturing and weaponizing the main media oversight bodies and adopting dubious content laws have enabled the regime to systematically, seriously, and unfairly censor dissenting speech. The Radio and Television Supreme Council (RTÜK), a state agency composed mostly of direct AKP appointees, has routinely sanctioned Turkey’s few remaining independent outlets for “spreading misinformation” and “insulting the president” with little supporting evidence. The repressive 2007 Law No. 5651 (“On the Internet”), which the regime significantly expanded in 2014, 2015, and 2020, further empowered state agencies and the Prime Minister to censor online content outright or restrict access to websites without a court order, so long as those were deemed a “risk to public security.” In 2023 alone, at least 22 journalists faced trial for “insulting the president” under Article 299 of the Criminal Code, such as Sedef Kabaş, a TV commentator who had questioned President Erdogan’s academic credentials and accused the AKP establishment of corruption online on Twitter. In 2021, the ECtHR ruled that domestic courts had violated Article 10 (“freedom of expression”) of the European Convention on Human Rights by convicting Vedat Şorli, a cartoonist sentenced to 11 months imprisonment in 2017 for lampooning Erdoğan. The 2021 ruling found that, insofar as it granted greater protection to the President, Article 299 contradicted the spirit of the Convention. The regime continues to fail to revise or retract Article 299.
The regime has systematically and unfairly shut down independent, dissenting organizations. In addition to the massive purges in the military, civil service, and academia, it shut down more than 1,500 independent civil society organizations (CSOs) and about 200 media outlets in the aftermath of the 2016 coup attempt. The ensuing state of emergency was also a pretext for further repression of national minorities, as the regime shuttered more than 90 pro-Kurdish CSOs on bogus charges. These included the Kurdish Institute in Istanbul (KII), the country’s largest independent Kurdish language institute, founded in 1992. In December 2016, regime officials confiscated the Institute’s property and shut down its website.
The AKP has also unfairly repressed peaceful dissenting gatherings, notably the 2025 protests denouncing İmamoğlu’s arrest and the 2013 Gezi Park peaceful demonstrations, which initially opposed the conversion of the park in Istanbul into a shopping mall by regime allies. The Gezi demonstrations subsequently spread to other parts of the country and addressed other grievances with the ruling party as well. While officials initially tolerated the demonstrations, Erdoğan framed them as a threat to national security and deployed riot police to disperse the peaceful crowds using armored vehicles, pepper spray, and stun grenades. Law enforcement injured at least 7,000 demonstrators and shot at least six. At least two other demonstrators died from complications arising from overexposure to tear gas used by regime officials. Rather than hold the perpetrating officers responsible, the regime used the protests as a pretext for the judicial persecution of critics involved with the demonstrations, such as the human rights defender Osman Kavala. Despite a 2019 ECtHR judgment that found Kavala’s detention unfounded and called for his immediate release, Istanbul’s 13th Assize Court sentenced him to life in prison without parole in 2022 for “plotting to overthrow the government.” As tens of thousands mobilized to oppose the politically motivated persecution of İmamoğlu in 2025, the regime deployed similar repressive tactics, dispersing some of the peaceful demonstrations with water cannons and tear gas, and detaining more than 1,000 peaceful protesters.
The regime has systematically engaged in and enabled transnational repression against dissidents abroad. Security agents have abducted and forcefully repatriated members of the Gülen movement, such as Salahattin Gülen, the nephew of the founding father, Fethullah Gülen. Turkey has also severely abused the Interpol “red notices” (requests to law enforcement in member-states to provisionally arrest a person pending extradition) and the Stolen and Lost Travel Document (SLTD) database to arbitrarily detain dissidents abroad and put them at risk of deportation. Hamza Yalçın, a regime critic who gained political asylum in Sweden in 1994, spent almost 60 days in detention in Spain in 2017 under a red notice issued by the regime. Yalçın, who had published articles criticizing the regime online, was indicted for “insulting the president” and is bound to stand trial if he returns to Turkey. Though the Spanish authorities ultimately declined to extradite him, his prolonged detention on bogus charges illustrates that red notices don’t even need to achieve their ultimate goal to harass dissidents. Similarly, by reporting critics’ travel documents as damaged or stolen on the SLTD, the regime has severely curtailed their freedom of movement, since they risk deportation while traveling internationally. In abusing the SLTD, officials are flagrantly violating rulings by the Constitutional Court of Turkey, according to which the judiciary has sole authority to declare the passports of Turkish citizens invalid. Turkey has also enabled the transnational repression perpetrated by other authoritarian regimes, including by actively detaining and/or extraditing dissidents who would likely face regime retaliation upon their return. In 2019, the regime declined to grant asylum to and repatriated Mohammad Rajabi and Saeed Tamjidi, prominent dissidents who fled Iran fearing regime retaliation for their participation in peaceful demonstrations. The two men were sentenced to death for inciting riots and “enmity against God” in Iran, among several other offenses.
In Turkey, institutions largely fail to serve as independent checks on the regime, notwithstanding the sporadic dissent of the Constitutional Court. The regime has systematically dismantled judicial independence through dubious constitutional amendments and mass purges of magistrates following the 2016 coup, which jointly allowed it to install its loyalists on the bench instead and immediately retaliate against the few judges who dissent. As a result of this effective overhaul, the courts have frequently rubber-stamped the AKP’s attempts to repress dissent, skew electoral competition in its favor, and further erode the operational capacity of the judicial and legislative branches and oversight institutions. In doing so, they have frequently disregarded binding rulings by higher domestic and international courts, as well as public outcry.
To preempt legal challenges to its increasing executive aggrandizement, the regime systematically subjected judicial institutions to reforms that abolished or seriously weakened their independence or operational effectiveness. Constitutional amendments starting in 2010 allowed the AKP-controlled parliament to effectively control appointments to the Constitutional Court and the Council of Judges and Prosecutors (HSK). Purges within the judiciary following the 2016 coup attempt cleared the way for packing the courts with regime loyalists. The HSK, on the other hand, is instrumental in maintaining the regime’s grip on the judicial branch, as it singlehandedly determines the hiring, promotion, transfer, and potential disciplinary actions against judges and prosecutors, without external oversight. Since the early 2010s, the HSK has played a pivotal role in ensuring that only regime-friendly prosecutors and judges would work on potentially politically sensitive cases, transferring hundreds of judicial personnel to other courts or dismissing them outright.
While instances of resolute judicial dissent exist, judges who rule contrary to regime interests have faced systematic retaliation, creating a lasting chilling effect within the judiciary. In 2015, Judges Metin Özçelik and Mustafa Başer, who had ordered the release of some 62 police officers and a journalist baselessly accused of association with the Gülen movement, were detained and charged with “membership in a terrorist organization.” In 2017, the Court of Cassation sentenced them to 10 years of imprisonment. Similarly, in the aftermath of the attempted coup, the mostly AKP-dominated Constitutional Court dismissed two of its 15 members, Professor Erdal Tezcan and Dr. Alparslan Altan, due to their alleged Gülenist links.
Reflecting their nearly complete capture by the regime, courts have systematically, frequently, and unfairly enabled the regime’s attempts to repress dissent – to such an extent that the Commissioner for Human Rights of the Council of Europe characterized arbitrary judicial persecution by the regime as “the most acute problem facing human rights defenders in Turkey” in 2020. The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has also underscored the regime’s abuse of anti-terrorist laws to persecute legitimate citizen activities, such as publishing opinions disagreeing with the state’s policies, organizing peaceful demonstrations, or simply using encrypted messaging applications.
Similarly, the courts have failed to check the regime’s arbitrary attempts to hold on to power and skew electoral competition in its favor. The regime’s 2022 electoral reform was a controversial policy that the opposition attempted to challenge legally. It raised eligibility criteria for parties to run in national elections: a party now has to establish branches in at least half of Turkey’s provinces at least six months before the election day. These prerequisites arguably obstruct smaller or newly registered parties. Given that members of banned pro-Kurdish parties have a history of re-registering under new parties to continue participating in the electoral process, it is plausible that the regime intended to use the measure to prevent such opponents from participating in elections. Despite these concerns, the Constitutional Court rejected the opposition’s challenge to the law’s constitutionality.
To entrench its rule amid diminishing popular support, the regime has seriously weakened the operational effectiveness of the legislature through dubious reforms, centralizing decision-making in the Office of the President and his inner circle. A 2017 referendum spearheaded by Erdoğan expanded presidential powers, while limiting the parliament’s role as a potential check on the executive. The president gained the power to hand-pick cabinet ministers, issue executive decrees without parliamentary review, and dissolve Parliament at will (with the sole stipulation that this also triggers snap presidential elections). By contrast, a three-fifths majority in Parliament – practically unattainable without the ruling party’s support – is required to call snap presidential or parliamentary elections without the president’s consent. The legislature also lost the power to initiate no-confidence votes against the cabinet.
Finally, the regime has subjected independent oversight institutions to reforms that abolish or seriously weaken their independence or operational independence, which has further enabled its consolidation. As discussed above, the main electoral agency, the YSK, has been effectively captured by the AKP, with critical implications for the overall integrity of elections. To illustrate, the YSK allowed Erdoğan to effectively “zero” his tally of consecutive terms and run in the 2023 presidential election, even though he had already held that office twice, starting in 2014 and 2018. He argued that he was entitled to two terms under the new constitutional framework established through the 2017 referendum. That is, his first term, 2014-2018, did not “count,” a dubious interpretation of the reforms the politically subservient YSK accepted – and one the mainstream opposition had no available legal avenues to contest, as the electoral commission’s decisions are, by definition, final. As a result, Erdoğan was allowed to run – and narrowly win – a de facto third consecutive term in 2023.
HRF classifies Turkey as ruled by a fully authoritarian regime.
The modern Turkish state emerged in 1923. The Turkish National Movement, led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, fought a successful independence war (1919-1923), culminating in the Grand National Assembly’s proclamation of Turkey as a sovereign republic, with Ankara as the capital and Atatürk as its first president. He would hold this office until his death in 1938, driving sweeping modernization and secularization reforms that transformed nearly every aspect of governance, from public education to the civil service. While Turkey held free and fair elections starting in 1950, democratic consolidation stagnated, and the military organized a series of coups in the second half of the 20th century, ostensibly to uphold the country’s secular foundations.
In 2002, the Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP) won a landslide election victory. The party had pledged to uphold the secularist principles embedded in the constitution and pursue pragmatic economic policies and greater integration with the West. The AKP and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan have been in power since, overseeing the gradual, but systematic, dismantling of the country’s democratic checks and balances and the increasing persecution of the mainstream political opposition. This erosion intensified following a failed coup attempt in 2016, which the ruling party used as a pretext for sweeping purges within the military, civil service, academia, and media, and further executive aggrandizement.
Under the continuing rule of the AKP, electoral competition is significantly skewed to the point where the mainstream political opposition has an unlikely but realistic chance to win. Erdoğan’s regime has persecuted prominent members of the main opposition parties, the Republican People’s Party (CHP) and the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP) and its successor, Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM), under false pretenses of corruption or extremism. It has also obstructed their electoral campaigns and undermined independent electoral oversight. Despite such structural disadvantages, the mainstream opposition has made significant strides in recent years, increasing its nationwide results in the 2023 parliamentary elections and winning in major cities, such as Istanbul and Ankara, in the 2019 and 2024 local elections.
Independent media, political leaders, civil society leaders, organizations, and regular people face overt and systematic retaliation if they openly criticize or challenge the regime, particularly following the massive 2013 Gezi park protests and a failed 2016 coup (whose perpetrators have not been definitively identified as of 2025), attempting to topple Erdoğan and the AKP-led Parliament. Even pre-2016, Turkey frequently jailed critical journalists on bogus charges. However, the judicial persecution of dissidents worsened dramatically in the aftermath, with the country frequently ranking amongst the leading jailers of journalists worldwide. The regime has also shut down dozens of independent NGOs, seized the assets of critical media outlets and placed them under its control, and violently repressed dissenting protests. Its crackdown on dissenting journalists and members of the general public intensified in response to the outpour of public support for the mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem İmamoğlu, following his arrest in March 2025, with some estimates suggesting more than 2,000 individuals were arbitrarily detained for taking part in peaceful demonstrations condemning his persecution. Lastly, the regime has used its protracted armed conflict against the militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) as justification for its systemic discrimination against Kurds.
Turkish institutions largely fail to serve as independent checks on the regime. In 2017, Erdoğan initiated a successful referendum on transitioning to a super-presidential system, which, in turn, severely limited the operational effectiveness of the legislative and judicial branches. While the Constitutional Court has occasionally acted to check the AKP and President Erdoğan, the judiciary as a whole has largely enabled the regime’s attempts to skew the electoral playing fields in its favor and repress criticism. Turkish courts have routinely rubber-stamped the persecution of prominent opposition leaders and dissidents on bogus charges and censored critical media content.
In Turkey, electoral competition is significantly skewed to the point where the mainstream political opposition has an unlikely but realistic chance to win. The regime has systematically resorted to politically motivated legal action to disqualify viable challengers from competing in elections and hamper the mainstream opposition’s capacity to campaign. At the same time, the AKP has entrenched extensive clientelist networks in key industries by abusing state resources. Its cronies, in turn, have provided a number of unfair campaign advantages, notably disproportionate media coverage. Lastly, the ruling party has effectively captured the Supreme Election Council (YSK), thereby undermining independent electoral oversight.
The regime has systematically and unfairly barred real, mainstream opposition parties or candidates from competing in elections, largely through politically motivated judicial persecution. Under Turkish law, individuals convicted of “intentional crimes,” a category covering a broad range of offenses, are not eligible to run for public office for at least three years after the end of their sentences, possibly longer, depending on whether a court actively restores their candidacy rights. The regime abused this law to disqualify Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, a prominent member of the opposition CHP party, from potentially challenging Erdoğan in the upcoming presidential election, expected in 2028. In March 2025, İmamoğlu was arrested on bogus allegations, including embezzlement, espionage, and forgery of his university diploma. In November, after months in pre-trial detention (ongoing as of December 2025), İmamoğlu was charged with 142 offenses, the sentences for which could total more than 2,000 years in prison. At least 16 CHP members elected mayors in the critical 2024 local elections are also facing politically motivated trials, the outcomes of which will profoundly impact the party’s operational capacity. The pro-Kurdish HDP party (which was subsequently re-registered under different names to avoid persecution) has also been systematically targeted. Its leaders, Selahattin Demirtaş and Figen Yüksekdağ, have been imprisoned since 2016 on bogus terrorism charges due to their alleged links to the militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). The PKK was designated as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the US, and the EU, among others, for its sustained armed struggle against the Turkish military and attacks on civilian targets in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s. The case was based almost entirely on political speeches by the two politicians, with no material evidence that they aided or abetted the PKK. The ECtHR found the convictions to be entirely politically motivated in a series of rulings between 2018 and 2022, which also called for Demirtaş’s and Yüksekdağ’s immediate release. Despite the ECtHR’s binding decisions, a domestic court sentenced the two leaders to lengthy prison terms in 2024, 42 and 30 years, respectively. The regime is also pursuing a lawsuit, still under review as of December 2025, to dissolve the HDP and ban more than 400 members from holding public office. In addition, in January 2023, the Constitutional Court ruled to freeze the party’s assets just months ahead of the 2023 parliamentary elections. While the court subsequently reversed course and lifted the measure in March 2023, international observers noted the nearly two-month lapse severely undermined the HDP’s capacity to campaign.
In addition to obstructing the mainstream opposition, the regime has systematically enjoyed significant and unfair campaign advantages, largely by abusing public resources to cultivate a loyal business class. These non-state actors have, in turn, systematically contributed to skewing the playing field in the AKP’s favor. The mechanisms underpinning this symbiosis vary, from punitive tax audits meted against independent businesses to lucrative public tenders and large loans with favorable conditions awarded to the regime’s cronies. Campaign finance loopholes and poor oversight mechanisms have, in turn, allowed these regime allies to boost the AKP’s electoral campaigns through generous campaign contributions or pro-regime media coverage in affiliate outlets. During its 20-year rule, the party amended the Public Procurement Law (PPL) more than 150 times and awarded the majority of public tenders to loyal firms. A 2013 corruption scandal in which local media revealed that senior AKP officials had incentivized several allied businesses to purchase the popular Turkuvaz media group by promising they would win big public tenders epitomized these dynamics. Equally important, those implicated evaded accountability: the regime-controlled prosecution discontinued its investigation into the respective businesses for fraud, tax evasion, and bribery, while law enforcement suppressed peaceful protests denouncing officials’ role in the scandal. As the 20 or so corporations that get the lion’s share of tenders also have vested interests in and strong editorial influence over multiple media outlets, they have directly contributed to the AKP’s overwhelming advantages in political media coverage. To illustrate, in the 2023 presidential and parliamentary elections, the OSCE also found impartial coverage of the campaign was essentially non-existent: the People’s Alliance, led by the AKP, featured in about 50% of all political news, portrayed mostly positively. By contrast, the opposition coalition appeared in less than 30%, cast in an overwhelmingly negative tone.
By effectively capturing the Supreme Election Council (YSK), the regime has systematically undermined independent electoral oversight to such an extent that the outcomes of legitimate elections have been effectively voided on arbitrary grounds. The council’s members, judges appointed on the basis of opaque criteria by largely AKP-dominated judicial bodies, have demonstrated bias in favor of the ruling party in a number of dubious decisions. In the 2019 local elections, the YSK ruled that 23 democratically elected mayors-elect from the pro-Kurdish HDP party could not take up their positions, as they had been previously dismissed from public office. The majority of these candidates had been dismissed in the aftermath of the 2016 coup attempt on bogus charges of supporting the PKK’s terrorist activities. The regime replaced these democratically elected representatives with “trustees” loyal to the ruling party. In Istanbul, the YSK annulled the results of the local 2019 election after the AKP claimed, without credible supporting evidence, that the CHP candidate Ekrem İmamoğlu’s narrow victory resulted from systemic electoral fraud. These tactics backfired, however, as İmamoğlu not only won the re-run, but significantly increased his margin of victory to more than 700,000 votes. Notably, the YSK’s decisions are not subject to external legal review, contributing to the OSCE’s assessment that Turkey lacks adequate mechanisms for electoral dispute resolution.
Despite its overwhelming structural advantages and arbitrary attempts to hold on to power, the AKP has not won recent elections with a very high vote share. It has also refrained from perpetrating massive electoral fraud or overtly coercing members of the general public to vote for it. The regime’s increasingly slim margins of victory indicate elections are not yet a sham or façade. Multiple factors underpin its diminishing performance: while a significant portion of longtime AKP supporters, disaffected with its economic policies, have swung to other conservative Islamist parties, the CHP has led highly effective electoral campaigns in recent national and local elections, reaching even conservative strongholds outside the major metropolitan areas, and mobilized citizen observers to guarantee the integrity of the vote. As a result of all these factors, the regime lost ground in 2023, as Erdoğan barely won the presidential run-off with 52% of the votes, and the party’s performance dropped to 35.6%, the lowest since 2002, compared to the CHP’s 25.3%. In the 2024 local elections, the CHP won in most of the country’s large cities, including Istanbul, and also gained more votes nationwide than the ruling party.
Independent media, political leaders, civil society leaders, organizations, and regular people face overt and systematic retaliation if they openly criticize or challenge the regime, particularly following the unsuccessful 2016 coup attempt. The regime has relentlessly prosecuted dissenting journalists and civil society leaders under vague laws, engaged in overt online censorship, and consolidated effective editorial control over a large enough segment of the media sector to overwhelmingly bias coverage in its favor. Weaponizing the state of emergency in the aftermath of the 2016 coup attempt, the ruling party purged hundreds of independent civil society organizations and media outlets, disproportionately targeting those affiliated with the political opposition and minority groups. The regime has also violently suppressed and criminalized dissenting protests, notably during and after the watershed 2013 Gezi Park protests. Lastly, it has simultaneously engaged in and enabled transnational repression against dissidents, frequently abusing international institutions in the process.
The regime had systematically and seriously intimidated and obstructed the work of independent, dissenting media, civil society leaders, and members of the general public, predominantly through politically motivated legal action. Suspected or actual members of the Gülen movement, also known as Hizmet (a transnational Islamist movement the regime accused of orchestrating the 2016 coup without compelling evidence), frequently faced charges of “membership in a terrorist organization” or the vaguer “supporting a terrorist organization without being a member.” Journalists from a handful of critical publications, such as the dailies Cumhuriyet or Zaman, were also disproportionately targeted under the Anti-Terrorism law. Their judicial persecution escalated to such an extent that in 2016, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) named Turkey the world’s “worst jailer of journalists,” with 84 journalists arbitrarily imprisoned that year. Ali Akkuş, the editor of Zaman, was one of 25 journalists of the outlet detained in the immediate aftermath of the coup attempt and initially sentenced to lengthy prison terms (up to life imprisonment) for “membership in a terrorist organization.” While the Supreme Court of Appeals overturned some of these convictions, citing due process violations and ordered retrials, the new proceedings did not necessarily lead to eventual acquittal or protect defendants from disproportionately strict detention: journalists Ahmet Altan, Nazlı Ilıcak, and Fevzi Yazıcı spent between three and seven years behind bars as appeal proceedings dragged on. In February 2024, the Supreme Court of Appeals found them guilty of “aiding a terrorist organization without being a member” and sentenced them to prison terms between three and six years. The regime had been targeting journalists from Zaman and Cumhuriyet even prior to 2016. In November 2015, regime officials arrested Can Dündar and Erdem Gül, editor-in-chief and Ankara representative of Cumhuriyet, respectively, and charged them with espionage and membership in a terrorist organization. Shortly before, the newspaper had published a story, supported with video evidence, on the Turkish National Intelligence’s (MIT) arms shipments to extremist rebels in Syria (the regime had publicly denied such support before). The two men spent more than three months in pre-trial detention in the maximum-security Silivri Prison before they were released, awaiting trial. Dündar fled to Germany in 2016 but was tried in absentia and sentenced to 27 years’ imprisonment in 2020. In February 2024, the Istanbul 14th Heavy Penal Court sentenced Gül to five years’ imprisonment. Due in no small part to this systematic crackdown on independent outlets and dissenting journalists, the regime controls between 75% and 90% of the entire media sector and has abused this monopoly to bias coverage in its favor. The AKP unfairly benefits from overwhelmingly positive reporting, while the mainstream opposition is portrayed negatively nearly all the time, particularly during election campaigns.
Capturing and weaponizing the main media oversight bodies and adopting dubious content laws have enabled the regime to systematically, seriously, and unfairly censor dissenting speech. The Radio and Television Supreme Council (RTÜK), a state agency composed mostly of direct AKP appointees, has routinely sanctioned Turkey’s few remaining independent outlets for “spreading misinformation” and “insulting the president” with little supporting evidence. The repressive 2007 Law No. 5651 (“On the Internet”), which the regime significantly expanded in 2014, 2015, and 2020, further empowered state agencies and the Prime Minister to censor online content outright or restrict access to websites without a court order, so long as those were deemed a “risk to public security.” In 2023 alone, at least 22 journalists faced trial for “insulting the president” under Article 299 of the Criminal Code, such as Sedef Kabaş, a TV commentator who had questioned President Erdogan’s academic credentials and accused the AKP establishment of corruption online on Twitter. In 2021, the ECtHR ruled that domestic courts had violated Article 10 (“freedom of expression”) of the European Convention on Human Rights by convicting Vedat Şorli, a cartoonist sentenced to 11 months imprisonment in 2017 for lampooning Erdoğan. The 2021 ruling found that, insofar as it granted greater protection to the President, Article 299 contradicted the spirit of the Convention. The regime continues to fail to revise or retract Article 299.
The regime has systematically and unfairly shut down independent, dissenting organizations. In addition to the massive purges in the military, civil service, and academia, it shut down more than 1,500 independent civil society organizations (CSOs) and about 200 media outlets in the aftermath of the 2016 coup attempt. The ensuing state of emergency was also a pretext for further repression of national minorities, as the regime shuttered more than 90 pro-Kurdish CSOs on bogus charges. These included the Kurdish Institute in Istanbul (KII), the country’s largest independent Kurdish language institute, founded in 1992. In December 2016, regime officials confiscated the Institute’s property and shut down its website.
The AKP has also unfairly repressed peaceful dissenting gatherings, notably the 2025 protests denouncing İmamoğlu’s arrest and the 2013 Gezi Park peaceful demonstrations, which initially opposed the conversion of the park in Istanbul into a shopping mall by regime allies. The Gezi demonstrations subsequently spread to other parts of the country and addressed other grievances with the ruling party as well. While officials initially tolerated the demonstrations, Erdoğan framed them as a threat to national security and deployed riot police to disperse the peaceful crowds using armored vehicles, pepper spray, and stun grenades. Law enforcement injured at least 7,000 demonstrators and shot at least six. At least two other demonstrators died from complications arising from overexposure to tear gas used by regime officials. Rather than hold the perpetrating officers responsible, the regime used the protests as a pretext for the judicial persecution of critics involved with the demonstrations, such as the human rights defender Osman Kavala. Despite a 2019 ECtHR judgment that found Kavala’s detention unfounded and called for his immediate release, Istanbul’s 13th Assize Court sentenced him to life in prison without parole in 2022 for “plotting to overthrow the government.” As tens of thousands mobilized to oppose the politically motivated persecution of İmamoğlu in 2025, the regime deployed similar repressive tactics, dispersing some of the peaceful demonstrations with water cannons and tear gas, and detaining more than 1,000 peaceful protesters.
The regime has systematically engaged in and enabled transnational repression against dissidents abroad. Security agents have abducted and forcefully repatriated members of the Gülen movement, such as Salahattin Gülen, the nephew of the founding father, Fethullah Gülen. Turkey has also severely abused the Interpol “red notices” (requests to law enforcement in member-states to provisionally arrest a person pending extradition) and the Stolen and Lost Travel Document (SLTD) database to arbitrarily detain dissidents abroad and put them at risk of deportation. Hamza Yalçın, a regime critic who gained political asylum in Sweden in 1994, spent almost 60 days in detention in Spain in 2017 under a red notice issued by the regime. Yalçın, who had published articles criticizing the regime online, was indicted for “insulting the president” and is bound to stand trial if he returns to Turkey. Though the Spanish authorities ultimately declined to extradite him, his prolonged detention on bogus charges illustrates that red notices don’t even need to achieve their ultimate goal to harass dissidents. Similarly, by reporting critics’ travel documents as damaged or stolen on the SLTD, the regime has severely curtailed their freedom of movement, since they risk deportation while traveling internationally. In abusing the SLTD, officials are flagrantly violating rulings by the Constitutional Court of Turkey, according to which the judiciary has sole authority to declare the passports of Turkish citizens invalid. Turkey has also enabled the transnational repression perpetrated by other authoritarian regimes, including by actively detaining and/or extraditing dissidents who would likely face regime retaliation upon their return. In 2019, the regime declined to grant asylum to and repatriated Mohammad Rajabi and Saeed Tamjidi, prominent dissidents who fled Iran fearing regime retaliation for their participation in peaceful demonstrations. The two men were sentenced to death for inciting riots and “enmity against God” in Iran, among several other offenses.
In Turkey, institutions largely fail to serve as independent checks on the regime, notwithstanding the sporadic dissent of the Constitutional Court. The regime has systematically dismantled judicial independence through dubious constitutional amendments and mass purges of magistrates following the 2016 coup, which jointly allowed it to install its loyalists on the bench instead and immediately retaliate against the few judges who dissent. As a result of this effective overhaul, the courts have frequently rubber-stamped the AKP’s attempts to repress dissent, skew electoral competition in its favor, and further erode the operational capacity of the judicial and legislative branches and oversight institutions. In doing so, they have frequently disregarded binding rulings by higher domestic and international courts, as well as public outcry.
To preempt legal challenges to its increasing executive aggrandizement, the regime systematically subjected judicial institutions to reforms that abolished or seriously weakened their independence or operational effectiveness. Constitutional amendments starting in 2010 allowed the AKP-controlled parliament to effectively control appointments to the Constitutional Court and the Council of Judges and Prosecutors (HSK). Purges within the judiciary following the 2016 coup attempt cleared the way for packing the courts with regime loyalists. The HSK, on the other hand, is instrumental in maintaining the regime’s grip on the judicial branch, as it singlehandedly determines the hiring, promotion, transfer, and potential disciplinary actions against judges and prosecutors, without external oversight. Since the early 2010s, the HSK has played a pivotal role in ensuring that only regime-friendly prosecutors and judges would work on potentially politically sensitive cases, transferring hundreds of judicial personnel to other courts or dismissing them outright.
While instances of resolute judicial dissent exist, judges who rule contrary to regime interests have faced systematic retaliation, creating a lasting chilling effect within the judiciary. In 2015, Judges Metin Özçelik and Mustafa Başer, who had ordered the release of some 62 police officers and a journalist baselessly accused of association with the Gülen movement, were detained and charged with “membership in a terrorist organization.” In 2017, the Court of Cassation sentenced them to 10 years of imprisonment. Similarly, in the aftermath of the attempted coup, the mostly AKP-dominated Constitutional Court dismissed two of its 15 members, Professor Erdal Tezcan and Dr. Alparslan Altan, due to their alleged Gülenist links.
Reflecting their nearly complete capture by the regime, courts have systematically, frequently, and unfairly enabled the regime’s attempts to repress dissent – to such an extent that the Commissioner for Human Rights of the Council of Europe characterized arbitrary judicial persecution by the regime as “the most acute problem facing human rights defenders in Turkey” in 2020. The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has also underscored the regime’s abuse of anti-terrorist laws to persecute legitimate citizen activities, such as publishing opinions disagreeing with the state’s policies, organizing peaceful demonstrations, or simply using encrypted messaging applications.
Similarly, the courts have failed to check the regime’s arbitrary attempts to hold on to power and skew electoral competition in its favor. The regime’s 2022 electoral reform was a controversial policy that the opposition attempted to challenge legally. It raised eligibility criteria for parties to run in national elections: a party now has to establish branches in at least half of Turkey’s provinces at least six months before the election day. These prerequisites arguably obstruct smaller or newly registered parties. Given that members of banned pro-Kurdish parties have a history of re-registering under new parties to continue participating in the electoral process, it is plausible that the regime intended to use the measure to prevent such opponents from participating in elections. Despite these concerns, the Constitutional Court rejected the opposition’s challenge to the law’s constitutionality.
To entrench its rule amid diminishing popular support, the regime has seriously weakened the operational effectiveness of the legislature through dubious reforms, centralizing decision-making in the Office of the President and his inner circle. A 2017 referendum spearheaded by Erdoğan expanded presidential powers, while limiting the parliament’s role as a potential check on the executive. The president gained the power to hand-pick cabinet ministers, issue executive decrees without parliamentary review, and dissolve Parliament at will (with the sole stipulation that this also triggers snap presidential elections). By contrast, a three-fifths majority in Parliament – practically unattainable without the ruling party’s support – is required to call snap presidential or parliamentary elections without the president’s consent. The legislature also lost the power to initiate no-confidence votes against the cabinet.
Finally, the regime has subjected independent oversight institutions to reforms that abolish or seriously weaken their independence or operational independence, which has further enabled its consolidation. As discussed above, the main electoral agency, the YSK, has been effectively captured by the AKP, with critical implications for the overall integrity of elections. To illustrate, the YSK allowed Erdoğan to effectively “zero” his tally of consecutive terms and run in the 2023 presidential election, even though he had already held that office twice, starting in 2014 and 2018. He argued that he was entitled to two terms under the new constitutional framework established through the 2017 referendum. That is, his first term, 2014-2018, did not “count,” a dubious interpretation of the reforms the politically subservient YSK accepted – and one the mainstream opposition had no available legal avenues to contest, as the electoral commission’s decisions are, by definition, final. As a result, Erdoğan was allowed to run – and narrowly win – a de facto third consecutive term in 2023.
