For a decade and a half, political scientists had a word for Turkey: competitive authoritarianism. Elections that were real but unfair, an opposition that could occasionally win. After last week, the word no longer fits. A court has removed Özgür Özel, leader of Turkey's main opposition party, the CHP. Not jailed a rival, as it did with the imprisoned Istanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, but reached inside the party itself and decided who may lead it. That is a different threshold, and it is worth being precise about what has been crossed. After that, we need to ask two questions. Why is Erdoğan doing this, and, the harder one, how is he able to? The answer runs past Erdoğan himself, into the system his rule depends on and protects, and the international silence that surrounds his authoritarianism. The irony is that Erdoğan's toolkit travels far and wide, and no "democracy" is immune, as we are now learning, to these methods of stifling opposition. open.substack.com/pub/ezgibasara…
