On September 30th, Turkey’s Criminal Court of Peace banned T24, a news portal based in the country, for alleged “LGBT Propaganda”. This follows suit in a growing number of interdictions spurned on by Recep Erdoğan, the current president since 2014’s, right leaning and populist-facing AK PARTi. This takedown covers all aspects of the program, including their X and Instagram accounts, along with their main site, and follows in line with Erdoğan’s recent push against LGBTQIA+ acceptance. This decision is in line with many common tendencies of populist leaders in power, and Erdoğan himself is mentioned in Jan-Werner Müller’s chapter of the same name, in his work titled What is Populism. In fact, many of the strategies mentioned in the first few pages of this chapter can all be found in this action, actions that similarly mirror current parallel efforts by the United States government to do the same. 

The Methods

First of all, the designation of an enemy. To be able to target the foundational norms of democracy, a leader looking to backslide (intentionally or unintentionally), must find targets that they can pin in front of these pillars, in order to systematically take them down while appearing as if they are protecting their state against actors that would look to do the very actions they undertake. For the AK, that has increasingly been the growing presence and normalization of LGBTQIA+ identifying individuals and relationships. While populist targets are more often than not economic, right populism often incorporates cultural movements as a way to appeal to reactionary sentiments. If said cultural targets are already somewhat marginalized, it allows them to galvanize that fear of the unknown into antagonism at those groups, rather than the regime’s actions themselves. So what do they do with this, what do these regimes go after? Often, as exemplified in this case, the press. 

The press is one of the most effective large-scale ways of transferring information, and thus has frequently been the first institution to be chipped away in a regime on its first legs of backsliding. Look no further for another example than the Trump Administration’s ban on CNN, Politico, and MS-Now from entering The White House. Both Trump and Erdoğan are looking to, through the guise of removing “voices of the enemy,” eliminate counteracting voices to their actions, as information is one of the chief ways to combat backsliding. For these regimes to be able to enact any of these effects however, they need to be at least in partial control of the judicial system, which can take some deft maneuvering of slowly placing judges favorable to the party. This has been done more outwardly in Turkey, through thousands of firings and imprisonments throughout the entire system, and more slowly in the United States, through justices mostly willing to go along with the policies that The White House and Congress have put out. 

Conclusion

In totality, Turkey and Erdoğan have proven, through the example of banning T24, that it has co–opted many of the telltale signs of backsliding through a populist demagogue, targeted movements against cultural ideas, judiciary control, and suppression of the press. Being further along the slide downward, these actions can be used as a lens for which states that are earlier in the process can be examined with, such as mentioned before, the United States government’s similar actions.