Can Turkey Find Its Way Back to Freedom? Authoritarian Consolidation Versus the Defense of Turkish Democracy
Dr. Barkey’s testimony argues that Turkey can no longer be classified even as a competitive authoritarian state: it has become a system of personal rule in which Erdoğan, after 23 years in power and unwilling to risk a free election he would likely lose, has criminalized rather than constrained the opposition, imprisoning not only prominent political figures but hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens, and only deepening the backlash that his eventual exit will bring.
Committee
House Foreign Affairs Committee, Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission
Hearing Title
Can Turkey Find Its Way Back to Freedom? Authoritarian Consolidation Versus the Defense of Turkish Democracy
Date
June 3, 2026
Dr. Barkey’s testimony argues that Turkey can no longer be classified even as a competitive authoritarian state. A country that two decades ago was a plausible candidate for European Union accession has become a system of personal rule built around a single individual, and the space for opposition has not been abolished so much as criminalized. Its victims are not only prominent political prisoners, but hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens. His bottom line is that the trajectory is not a matter of contested interpretation: Erdoğan is circumventing the ordinary political process because, after 23 years in power, he cannot risk a free and fair election he would likely lose, and the longer he stays, the greater the eventual backlash will be.
His testimony makes this argument through six key points:
- Turkey has become a personalist regime built around a single individual. Since the failed July 2016 coup attempt, the institutions of the Turkish state, including its courts, prosecutors, broadcast regulator, central bank, and electoral commission, have been progressively reconfigured to serve the political continuity of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The 2017 constitutional referendum abolished the office of the prime minister and concentrated power in the presidency. The presidential commission appointed in May 2025 to draft a new constitution is the latest step in this trajectory, one that would inscribe personal rule in the country’s foundational law.
- The judiciary has been captured and now serves as the regime’s primary instrument. Roughly one quarter of the bench, about 4,399 judges and prosecutors, was dismissed after the 2016 coup attempt and replaced through accelerated appointments tied to executive alignment. The courts now ignore binding rulings when inconvenient: as of late 2025 Turkey stood in violation of more than eighty unimplemented European Court of Human Rights judgments and a comparable number of unimplemented rulings of its own Constitutional Court. The Osman Kavala and Can Atalay cases illustrate a justice system subordinated to political ends.
- Independent journalism and civil society have been criminalized. Turkey ranks 159th out of 180 countries on the Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index. The 2022 disinformation law and Article 299 of the Penal Code, which criminalizes insulting the president, are routinely used to prosecute journalists and ordinary citizens alike. Since 2016, Turkish authorities have shut down more than 1,500 foundations and associations, placing the entire associational sector under the threat of administrative dissolution.
- Imprisonment itself has become the principal instrument of political incapacitation. Opposition leaders, especially advocates of Kurdish rights, are convicted on the basis of speeches that would not constitute a criminal offense in any system respecting the rule of law. Selahattin Demirtaş, the former co-chair of the Peoples‘ Democratic Party, has been jailed since November 2016 despite three separate ECtHR rulings against his detention. Prolonged pretrial detention, denial of release pending appeal, and successive prosecutions, rather than any single conviction, accomplish the political goal.
- The kayyum (trustee) system allows the executive to overturn elections by administrative fiat. Built on a 2016 emergency decree, it permits the Interior Minister to remove elected mayors accused (not convicted) of aiding terrorism and to install state appointees, dissolving the municipal council by the same order. First applied systematically against Kurdish municipalities, it was extended to the main opposition Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi (CHP) in October 2024, when Ahmet Özer of Istanbul’s Esenyurt district became the first CHP mayor removed under the mechanism. The prosecutorial campaign that followed, including the March 2025 arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu on the day his party was scheduled to nominate him for the presidency and the detention of fifteen other CHP mayors, marked the most aggressive assault on electoral competition in the republic’s history.
- The legal infrastructure reaches hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens. Between July 2016 and July 2018, more than 130,000 public servants were dismissed by decree, losing not only their jobs but their passports, pensions, professional licenses, and social security, a condition Turkish civil society calls sivil ölüm (civil death). Article 299 prosecutions have swept up pensioners, students, and 100 minors, attaching criminal liability to everyday political expression and producing a broad chilling effect.