No tanks required

In March 2025, police arrested Istanbul’s mayor, Ekrem İmamoğlu, on corruption charges; prosecutors are seeking a prison sentence of up to 2,352 years.

This year, police arrested the opposition mayor of Uşak, in Turkey’s west, on bribery charges. The same month, they seized the mayor of Bursa, Mustafa Bozbey, along with 54 other suspects, also on corruption charges.

Now Ankara’s mayor, Mansur Yavaş, faces a probe into the misuse of public funds—in 2023, he allegedly used municipal cars to get to an election rally.

The main opposition’s leader has said the ruling AKP—the Justice and Development Party—is using these corruption cases as a pretext to “eliminate its rivals.”

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is tightening his grip. But he’s run Turkey for more than two decades—as prime minister from 2003, as president since 2014. So why now?

Ezgi Başaran is an associate member of the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford and the author of The New Spirit of Islamism: Interactions between the AKP, Ennahda, and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Başaran says Erdoğan is tightening his hold on Turkey because it had been slipping. He has been under growing pressure since the main opposition won a string of victories in the 2024 local elections. For the first time in his career, Başaran says, he found himself on the losing side.

The main opposition, moreover, kept gaining ground—enough that, left unchecked, it threatened his bid to stay in power, perhaps even past his current term. A show of strength, in other words, forced by mounting weakness.

But Erdoğan has operated cannily, Başaran says. If the indictments look crude, the courts have been pliant, because he has been sophisticated about bringing them to heel. He knows how to turn a looming defeat into a victory. The failed military coup of 2016, he said, was “a gift from God,” because it let him remake the state as he saw fit. Now, under growing pressure again, he is trying to work the same trick …

Gustav Jönsson: What’s the state of play?

Ezgi Başaran: The short version: The Turkish state—or the Erdoğan regime, as I prefer to call it—has moved from harassing the opposition to dismantling it.

There’s a clear pattern. Since 2024, the regime has arrested hundreds of members of the Republican People’s Party—the CHP, the main opposition—including 16 elected mayors, on corruption charges. Among them is Istanbul’s mayor, Ekrem İmamoğlu. He isn’t only the mayor of Istanbul; he is the most credible challenger to Erdoğan, and he has been in jail for more than a year.