The Turkish phrase Gözaltına alınıyorum translates simply as: ‘I’m being taken into custody.’ This was selected by the independent media outlet T24 as the phrase of the year for 2025. Had it not been that, in my view, it just as easily could have been Türkiye’de yargı bağımsızdır, meaning ‘the judiciary in Turkey is independent,’ a line repeated endlessly, like a tongue-twister, by Ministers and MPs from Erdoğan’s ruling party, the AKP. And yes, I’m being ironic.
On March 19, Turkey woke up to a morning marked by an operation aimed at eliminating the possibility of a change in power through elections, and declaring open war on institutional opposition.
The mayor of the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality (IMM) and the opposition’s presidential hopeful, Ekrem İmamoğlu, was taken into custody along with dozens of IMM employees and close members of his team. Shortly afterward, university students organized and gathered in front of Istanbul University main campus, marching toward Saraçhane, which is the location of the Istanbul mayoral headquarters, just a couple of kilometers away.
Then more people joined. And more.
Emergency bans on unauthorized demonstrations and marches were imposed at lightning speed. Metro and bus services were cancelled by government decree to block access to the area. The police presence and traffic checkpoints increased rapidly. Even these hastily implemented measures – designed specifically to prevent people from gathering in front of the IMM headquarters – failed to stop hundreds of thousands from filling the streets within hours.
In the days that followed, people maintained a vigil through the nights, both at Çağlayan Courthouse, where Mayor İmamoğlu was taken, and in front of the municipality building. They refused to leave the Squares.
While all this was unfolding, people like me – those watching from afar living abroad – fell into a grimly familiar ritual. Every morning around 6am, opening X (Twiiter) meant watching your entire timeline fill, within seconds, with posts like:
“I’m being taken into custody.”
“Police raided my home at dawn. I’m being taken into custody.”
“The police came to my apartment in Şişli around 4:30 a.m. Please take care of my dog. I think I’m being taken into custody.”
There were dozens of such tweets. Some days, without exaggeration, hundreds.
Turkey Isn’t Outside the West. It Helped Build It
Fast forward to today. Ekrem İmamoğlu, along with over 400 others, has been held in pretrial detention for nine months. Those detained include sixteen mayors from the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP); his lawyer, Mehmet Pehlivan; his election campaign adviser, Necati Özkan; his drivers, Recep Cebeci and Zekai Kıratlı (whose names do not even appear in the 4,000-page indictment); his assistant, Kadriye Kasapoğlu; district mayor Murat Çalık, a two-time cancer survivor currently undergoing treatment; and hundreds of others I cannot possibly list here.
As I write these lines, social media is once again flooded with news of fresh crackdowns targeting the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality. The municipality’s deputy secretary general, the head of the fire department, Remzi Albayrak, and dozens of others have been taken into custody as part of the ongoing operations against İmamoğlu and his circle.
All of these individuals are accused of forming a criminal organization, corruption, causing public financial loss, and terrorism – charges that, over time, have increasingly been reframed as espionage, alongside several other alleged crimes.
According to legal professionals and academics, these accusations are laid out in an indictment of roughly 4,000 pages that does not read as if it were prepared with professional rigour. The document has been widely criticized for being grossly inflated, riddled with technical errors, filled with repetitive sections, reliant almost exclusively on anonymous “secret witness” testimony, and strikingly devoid of concrete or substantiated evidence. More troubling still, some of the more than 400 people currently in detention are not even named in the indictment, yet they remain behind bars.
Very recently, the European Court of Human Rights decided to fast-track Ekrem İmamoğlu’s case, specifically his application concerning unlawful detention. The application was filed by his lawyer, Mehmet Pehlivan who is himself currently in detention.
Yet the European Court of Human Rights, along with international institutions more broadly, is increasingly portrayed by the Erdoğan government, now in its twenty-third year in power, as anti-national, foreign-backed, and unpatriotic. In official rhetoric, these institutions are cast as insufficiently “domestic” and allegedly hostile to Turkey’s national interests.
This framing follows a familiar authoritarian script, but reality is more complicated, and far less convenient. Turkey is not an outsider to the Western political and legal order. It helped build it.
Turkey is a founding signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights and a member of the Council of Europe, making it legally bound by both the Convention’s provisions and the case law of the European Court of Human Rights. It is also a party to the core United Nations human rights treaties.
What, then, is the purpose of this fabricated, anti-Western, exclusionary narrative?
‘Down With Tyranny, Long Live Freedom!’
The aim is to crush resistance, normalize sweeping losses of rights, freedoms, and prosperity, and impose a “new Turkey” modelled on a hybrid of Central Asian authoritarianism, Russian-style rule, and the institutional failures of parts of the post-colonial Middle East.
This vision is fundamentally incompatible with Turkey’s realities: its diverse socio-cultural fabric and, more importantly, its socio-political legacy of more than two centuries of struggle for democracy and modernization.
That legacy dates back to 1839, a decisive turning point in Ottoman history, when decades-long, Western-oriented reform efforts were institutionalized through the Tanzimat Edict. These reforms eventually led to the establishment of the first parliament and the first civilian constitution in 1876.
With the Tanzimat Edict, Ottoman subjects were recognized as equal citizens for the first time. Egalitarian reforms in areas such as taxation and military service aimed to ensure that non-Muslims, alongside Turkish Muslim citizens, bore the same duties and responsibilities toward the state.
The reforms also sought to guarantee the security of life, property, and honour for all citizens; to ensure property could be lawfully inherited; to establish transparency in judicial proceedings; and to prohibit executions without due process.
These principles were not merely rhetorical. Concrete regulations gave them legal force, and the constitution that followed formally limited and distributed the powers of the sultan.
In 1858, homosexuality was decriminalized, making the Ottoman Empire the second state in the world, after France in 1791, to take such a remarkable step.
The path toward building a republic grounded in parliamentary democracy and equal citizenship, however, was never linear. As in France, Italy, or Japan, and many other democracies, progress came through reversals and ruptures. The Ottoman Empire’s first constitution was suspended and parliament dissolved, only to be reinstated three decades later. As borders across Europe were redrawn through wars and upheaval, this turbulent process culminated in the founding of the Republic of Turkey.
Like other nations, Turks did not abandon the desire for a better future or the struggle required to build it. Today, however, all of this is under threat.
President Erdoğan has amassed more power than many Ottoman sultans and continues to seek more. Research by the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg shows that Turkey’s democracy score stood at 0.17 in the early 1900s, rose to 0.53 in the early years of the republic, reached 0.74 in 2002 when Erdoğan’s AKP first came to power, and has since fallen back to 0.18.
It is no coincidence that a slogan more than a century old has returned to the streets: Kahrolsun istibdat, yaşasın hürriyet! meaning ‘Down with tyranny, long live freedom.’ It has been one of the most frequently chanted slogans at the Saraçhane demonstrations following İmamoğlu’s imprisonment.
For more than two decades, Turkey’s media has been monopolized by oligarchs handpicked by Erdoğan. As a result, the voices of ordinary, hardworking, middle class Turks have been largely silenced, especially abroad. Deliberate policies have severed society’s connection with the outside world, suppressed public expression, and helped cement an image of Turkey as a failed democracy which is a perception many in the West has accepted uncritically.
The Syrian war, and the years-long influx of refugees have reinforced this distorted view. Since 2012, Turkey has become nearly inseparable from Syria in the Western imagination, as if the country had absorbed another nation entirely. Over more than a decade, this association has come at steep economic, political, and moral costs, leaving Turkey and Syria almost interchangeable in the minds of outsiders.
It is precisely these deliberately erased realities of Turkey that I want to bring back into focus in this article.
Through its constitution, Turkey is a parliamentary democracy, and until roughly a decade ago, it functioned as one, at least since 1950, around the same time many Western democracies were consolidating. Eastern Europe, by contrast, remained under authoritarian rule until the 1990s. Since 2017, however, Turkey has gradually morphed into an electoral autocracy, with steadily eroding rights and freedoms.
Yet Turkish society itself is not defined by these trends. Erdoğan is attempting to impose a regime change against the will of the people.
Even before the unlawful detention of İmamoğlu and hundreds of others, a 2024 PEW Research survey showed that 67 percent of Turks were dissatisfied with the country’s democracy. Among those under 35, that figure rises to 75 percent. Eighty percent of respondents support direct, electoral democracy, while 62 percent reject the idea of indefinite rule by a strongman.
In another striking example, 56 percent of people in Turkey believe that religious texts – given the country’s Muslim-majority population, in this case the Quran – should have no influence over the constitution or laws. This figure is several times higher than in other Muslim-majority countries, where comparable research could be conducted.
For context, the same survey analyzed thirty-six countries, including Tunisia, which experienced a brief period of parliamentary democracy between 2011 and 2021 and today scores slightly higher than Turkey on democracy indices. Yet Tunisia is excluded from the section of the study that examines the role of the Quran in politics simply because even asking such questions is socially unacceptable there, despite Tunisia being one of the West’s preferred points of comparison with Turkey. By comparison, the equivalent figures are 51 percent in the United States, 57 percent in Poland (referring to the Bible), 54 percent in Israel (Jewish scripture), and just 12 percent in India (Hindu scripture).
Only 17 percent of people in Turkey believe religious texts should influence national laws. By contrast, the figure is 66 percent in Indonesia (home to Bali, often perceived as a globally famous, relatively secular tourist destination), 22 percent in our complex, love-hate neighbor Greece, and 28 percent in the United States.
Why does this matter?
The overwhelming majority of Turks, regardless of religiosity or whether they vote for Erdoğan and the AKP, support Turkey’s constitutional definition as a secular, parliamentary, democratic republic. They want these founding principles to remain intact, and they are deeply dissatisfied with the current system of governance.
A new constitutional amendment is expected soon. Just as previous amendments were justified with buzzwords like “military oversight,” “judiciary status quo,” or “democratization,” the government is likely to use the cultural rights demands of Turkey’s ethnic minorities, particularly the Kurds, as a pretext for a full constitutional overhaul. In reality, these issues could be addressed through minor, targeted adjustments without rewriting the constitution.
In the near future, many will try to tell you otherwise. Please, don’t believe them.
