Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been running Turkey for 22 years, and has spent much of that time dismantling the foundations of its democracy. Since changing the constitution in 2017, Turkey’s president has ruled with few checks on his authority. His government controls the courts, the security apparatus and almost all the media. Yet until last week Turkey remained what political scientists call a competitive authoritarian regime: a flawed multiparty democracy where the opposition can, in theory, win elections, and often does, at least at the local level. Since the arrest on March 19th of Ekrem Imamoglu, the mayor of Istanbul and Mr Erdogan’s strongest rival, that may no longer apply.
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