A Long Battle: Turkey’s Backsliding and Resistance Through Trench Warfare

Abstract

Since 2002, governments led by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his party have taken Turkey’s political regime from electoral democracy to electoral autocracy. This has been principally accomplished through legislative capture: control, abuse, and weaponization of Parliament to pass democracy-eroding laws, discredit opposition, and legitimize executive authoritarianism. But other tools, such as executive power grabs, were also used against strong state institutions, civil society, and even by Erdoğan against his own party. Democratic backsliding advanced through crises that polarized the electorate and through fierce political warfare between the incumbent government and its opponents. Like other cases on the legislative capture pathway, opposition parties have resisted backsliding predominantly through electoral mobilization, but their partial access to the legislature has, for the most part, limited their capacity to join forces with grassroots contentious politics. The opposition has not developed solutions for programmatic renewal that might heal formative rifts and lead to sustainable recovery.