Turkey still holds elections, yet democratic competition in the country has become increasingly constrained. Freedom House’s 2026 report rates Turkey 32/100 and classifies it as “Not Free,” describing a system in which Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the AKP have consolidated power through constitutional change, the imprisonment of political opponents, and intensified suppression of dissent. This raises a broader question: how can a state preserve electoral form while steadily weakening democratic substance? Turkey is a particularly revealing case because it combines electoral continuity, formal secularism, religiously mediated state legitimacy, and increasingly centralized executive power. Under Erdoğan, Turkey has moved further toward autocracy not through a sudden rupture, but through the combined use of religion, legal and institutional tactics, and state repression to weaken opposition and democratic accountability while preserving the appearance of democracy.

Democratic erosion in Turkey is better understood not as the immediate disappearance of elections, but as the weakening of the conditions that make democracy meaningful. Lust and Waldner define democratic backsliding as deterioration in competitive elections, civil and political liberties, and accountability, rather than a single dramatic regime collapse. In Turkey, that framework matters because the issue is no longer simply whether elections occur, but whether opposition parties, courts, media, and ordinary citizens can still act freely enough to constrain executive power in practice. As Lührmann & Lindberg (2019) reinforce, this represents a third wave of autocratization where leaders use a legal façade to mimic democratic institutions while hollowing them out from within.

Erdoğan’s consolidation of power relies on executive aggrandizement – a process in which elected leaders gradually expand executive authority while weakening institutional constraints such as courts, legislatures, and the media. Political scientist Murat Somer argues that Erdoğan and the AKP undermined democracy by imprisoning opposition figures, controlling the courts and legislature, and threatening critical media through legal pressure, while polarization made these moves easier to normalize and harder to resist. In Turkey, democratic backsliding and autocratization are therefore not abstract labels but visible political processes carried out through institutions that still appear formally democratic.

Religion also matters in this process. Although Turkey remains formally secular, Sunni institutions receive state support through the Directorate of Religious Affairs, compulsory religious education remains embedded in public schooling, and Alevis and other minorities continue to face unequal treatment. That asymmetry helps the government present its authority as morally grounded and culturally legitimate, while making dissent easier to frame as disorderly, offensive, or socially dangerous. In this sense, religion becomes more than a matter of private belief; it helps give executive power a moral shield. Rather than replacing legal and institutional repression, religious legitimacy helps soften and normalize it.

Recent developments make this pattern especially visible. After suffering losses in municipal elections, the government launched criminal investigations that led to arrests of hundreds of opposition party representatives in 2025. Istanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu was arrested in March, shortly before he was formally chosen as the CHP’s next presidential candidate. While the government officially frames these actions as necessary national security or counter-terrorism measures, international monitors like Human Rights Watch describe the charges as politically motivated attempts to sideline a rival. The protests that followed were met with tear gas, water cannons, rubber bullets, and thousands of arrests. These events matter not just because they are repressive in themselves, but because they show how legal procedures and state force can be used together to make democratic contestation less effective before voters even reach the ballot box. This pattern also has deeper roots. After the 2013 Gezi protests, authorities intensified crackdowns on assembly, speech, and social media, turning protest into a justification for broader surveillance and repression.

This case connects directly to what we have gathered from our comparative politics class discussions of democratic backsliding and Varol’s concept of stealth authoritarianism. Varol’s main point is that many modern autocracies do not always rely on openly dictatorial rule, but instead operate through legal and sub-constitutional mechanisms such as judicial review, libel lawsuits, electoral laws, surveillance laws and institutions, non-political crimes, and the bolstering of domestic and global legitimacy. In that sense, the purpose is not to make power appear absolutely imposed, but to preserve the appearance of legality while restricting the ability of ordinary people to challenge already existing power. As seen in the recent municipal arrests and the historical Gezi crackdowns, Turkey fits this pattern very closely: opposition faces institutional barriers, civil and political liberties have narrowed, and the judiciary and legislature have become less capable of constraining executive power. Lust & Waldner (2015), along with Lührmann & Lindberg (2019), reinforce this point by describing democratic decline there as a corruption of institutions intensified by polarization. Turkey is therefore not just a country experiencing scattered abuses, but a textbook case of broader democratic decline carried out through institutions that still appear formally democratic.

Turkey matters beyond its own borders because it shows how democracy can weaken long before it formally disappears. When governments preserve elections but reduce the ability of opposition parties, courts, journalists, and citizens to hold power accountable, democratic life becomes thinner even if its outer shell remains. Readers should pay attention to how polarization, legal language, religious legitimacy, and executive coordination can work together to strip citizens of the few democratic tools they still hold. Democracy survives not only through voting, but through an ecosystem of free expression, meaningful opposition, and institutions strong enough to check power. Turkey’s case is therefore a warning: once those conditions are steadily weakened, democracy may still exist in name while losing the practices that make it real. In that sense, democratic institutions can be repurposed as instruments of regime legitimacy, making it increasingly difficult to distinguish genuine democratic authority from consolidated executive power.