“I am 59 years old. All these years, I have had my own worldview, my own outlook on life. If I abandoned all of that in a day and switched to the AKP, first of all, the people closest to me wouldn’t be able to look me in the face. My mother said she would disown me. My wife said she would divorce me.”

That was İzmir Mayor Cemil Tugay in January 2026, talking about President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP). Eight months later, on October 7, Erdoğan pinned an AKP badge on Tugay’s lapel in front of a cheering room of party lawmakers, with Tugay’s wife beside them on stage.

With that badge, Turkey’s ruling party captured one of the opposition’s most important bastions, İzmir. A city the AKP has never won at the ballot box. A city seen as an unshakable secular, center-left stronghold. A city perhaps best described to a foreign audience by saying it is to Turkey what California is to the United States. This was just the latest in a series of events signaling an opposition crumbling in on itself.

Repression of the opposition is nothing new in Turkish politics. And yet, recent events have shown that fracturing Turkey’s opposition has worked better than jailing its leaders. Arrests create martyrs and give people a reason to take to the streets; meanwhile, fragmentation carries a semblance of legitimacy and makes the opposition look like it is falling apart on its own. That is precisely what makes it more dangerous.

Levitsky and Ziblatt describe several ways elected autocrats weaken their rivals, including sidelining key players, like jailing opposition leaders, and capturing the referees, by turning courts into tools of the government. Erdoğan’s government has done both, but the second has done far more damage. Ozan Varol’s concept of stealth authoritarianism helps explain why; repression carried out through legal channels is harder to recognize, and harder to resist, than repression that isn’t.

The Republican People’s Party (CHP) has lost every general and presidential election since AKP first came to power in 2002. But the pressure on the opposition has particularly intensified in the last two years (perhaps not coincidentally) as the opposition grew stronger. Erdoğan narrowly won the 2023 presidential runoff, and in March 2024 the CHP won the local elections, finishing first nationwide for the first time since 1977.

Then, in March 2025, the government enacted a major escalation by detaining and jailing İstanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, the leading potential challenger to Erdoğan, in what authorities described as a corruption investigation into the municipality. In Levitsky and Ziblatt’s terms, this was a textbook case of sidelining a key player.

The reaction was immediate and major. İmamoğlu’s arrest sparked Turkey’s largest protests in over a decade. Defying a four-day protest ban, around 300,000 people rallied in Istanbul, and demonstrations spread to 55 of the country’s 81 provinces. Still, the arrests continued. In July 2025, 120 people were detained in an İzmir corruption probe, including the former mayor and the CHP’s provincial chair.

And yet, these efforts to sideline the opposition’s players arguably backfired, at least politically. Of course, they dealt a huge blow to the party, to whatever remains of Turkish democracy, and to the people arrested. However, they also had a rallying effect around the CHP, and by January 2026, ORC polling had the party narrowly ahead of the AKP.

Then, the strategy shifted to something subtler.

In May 2026, an Ankara appeals court voided the 2023 congress where delegates had replaced longtime leader Kılıçdaroğlu with the reformist Özgür Özel, part of the change behind the CHP’s 2024 revival. Citing alleged procedural violations, the court removed Özel and reinstated Kılıçdaroğlu as party leadership, effectively deciding who would lead Turkey’s main opposition party. Three days later, police raided the CHP headquarters to enforce the takeover, reportedly at Kılıçdaroğlu’s own request.

What followed was an implosion of the opposition. By late July, Özel announced his departure from the CHP and formed his own party, Yeni Parti (or the New Party), taking around 90 members of parliament with him. Much of the base followed, but the split was costly. That summer, an Areda poll had the AKP back in first place at 35.3%, with the New Party at 16.6% and the CHP at 12.2%.

Then came the defections. More than 30 mayors elected on the CHP ticket switched to the AKP before Tugay did. Tugay had left the CHP in protest of the court ruling and said he would join a new party if Özel founded one. Despite remaining independent when the New Party launched, he could not exactly be written off as one of Kılıçdaroğlu’s old guard.

But why treat this as part of a regime strategy, rather than individual decisions or simple dysfunction? First, the fracture that made these defections possible was not self-inflicted. It began with a court ruling that removed the leader who had turned the CHP into a renewed threat. Second, the defections did not happen in a vacuum. Özel has accused the AKP of using blackmail and the threat of imprisonment to pressure Tugay, who insists he switched parties to better serve İzmir. Whether or not Özel’s claim is true, the context is hard to ignore. İzmir’s former mayor is in prison, and in the year before his switch, Tugay met with government ministers about the city’s international loan approvals. Whether he was coerced or simply enticed, his choice was clearly made under pressures only the central government could apply.

Hence, fragmentation has proven more effective than arrests. While jailing İmamoğlu handed the opposition a clear enemy to rally against, the court ruling and the defections that followed did the opposite. Instead, there was a court ruling that looked like an internal dispute and politicians who appeared to leave their own party. The blame shifted onto the opposition itself, and its energy turned inward toward fights over power dynamics, rather than outward toward the government.

Of course, the opposition is far from finished. Together, the New Party and the CHP are roughly level with the AKP, and even ahead of it in some polls. Nevertheless, a split opposition is not the same as a strong one. Even with a runoff, rival parties still fight over who leads the bloc, and every defection raises the question of whether a vote for the opposition will stay with the opposition. If voters cannot trust a man who once said his own wife would divorce him for joining the AKP, how are the Turkish people supposed to build an opposition strong enough to stand up to a regime that refuses to loosen its grip?

Perhaps this reading is unduly pessimistic, and the opposition’s struggles will prove temporary. My argument could be proven wrong if the opposition reunifies, or if the New Party establishes itself as a viable challenger on its own. Still, the larger lesson holds either way. The world knows how to recognize a jailed opposition leader, but it is less likely to recognize a court ruling on a party congress, or a mayor switching parties as repression.

İzmir never voted for the AKP, and yet, it has an AKP mayor anyway.