“Have you ever thought about what it means to deprive a man for nine years of his freedom when his innocence has already been established by an international court’s ruling, and what a source of shame this is for the citizens of that state?”

These words, from former ECtHR judge and diplomat Rıza Türmen, cut to the heart of a judgment that is no longer just about one innocent man’s plight, but about the rubble called “the misrule of law” in Turkey.

On 25 August 2026, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights delivered its third and most sweeping ruling on Osman Kavala, finding by 15 votes to 2 that Turkey had violated five separate provisions of the Convention: the right to liberty (Article 5§1), the right to a fair trial (Article 6§1), freedom of expression (Article 10), freedom of assembly (Article 11), and, damningly, Article 18, which bars states from misusing legitimate restrictions for ulterior political purposes.

The Court also found a violation of Article 3, ruling that Kavala’s aggravated life sentence, with no mechanism for review, amounted to inhuman and degrading treatment.

Taken together, they say that Kavala’s entire deprivation of liberty since 10 December 2019 was incompatible with the Convention, that his conviction is to be treated as “null and void” under Convention law, and that Turkey must secure his release “at the earliest possible date.”

The Article 18 finding is the sharpest section in the judgment: the Court is not merely saying Turkish courts erred procedurally, it is saying the entire prosecution was staged for the “ulterior purpose” of punishing and silencing a human rights defender.

As legal scholar Ali Ulusoy put it in T24, the ruling establishes as a matter of settled fact that Kavala has been unjustly imprisoned for close to nine years, and that Turkey should simply “cut its losses” and comply, since every additional day only deepens the state’s exposure.

This goes well beyond an individual grievance: it is a judicial indictment of a legal system that used judges and prosecutors as instruments of political retaliation, precisely the systemic critique of the collapse of the rule of law in Turkey that human rights monitors have been making for years. Ulusoy’s phrase is blunt: the ruling means Kavala’s conviction is, in effect, “null and void.”

Rıza Türmen goes further in his article, noting the judgment was “very well written” and does not stop at Kavala’s individual file, instead pointing to structural flaws in the Turkish judiciary, above all its instrumentalization for political ends.

He also flags something that will trouble Ankara’s legal establishment: the Grand Chamber’s finding that Turkey’s own Constitutional Court failed to function as an effective domestic remedy in this case, a rebuke that undercuts the credibility of the country’s highest constitutional body.

Türmen insists that Article 46 of the Convention makes the judgment binding not only on the state but on its judiciary, meaning Turkish courts are now legally obligated to reopen the case and release Kavala, regardless of any individual judge’s personal conviction.

There is a precedent for what happens when a state simply refuses. In “Ilgar Mammadov v. Azerbaijan” case, the Grand Chamber in 2019 took the extraordinary step, for the first time in Convention history, of formally ruling under Article 46§4 that a member state had failed to comply with a binding judgment, after Baku kept a political activist detained despite an unambiguous order to free him.

The Court called Azerbaijan’s continuing detention of Mammadov “a flagrant breach” of its Convention obligations.

Kavala’s case now sits on that same knife-edge: Türkiye has already ignored two prior Kavala rulings, including one demanding immediate release, and the Committee of Ministers has repeatedly flagged non-compliance.

If Ankara stalls again, infringement proceedings modeled on the Mammadov precedent become not a theoretical risk but a live possibility, one that would formally brand Türkiye, a NATO member and nominal EU candidate, a rule-of-law outlier alongside Azerbaijan.

The Turkish presidency’s response has been to reject the Court’s authority outright. Mehmet Uçum, Erdoğan’s chief legal advisor, declared that the ECtHR “is not a court of appeal, nor in any way a hierarchical superior judicial authority,” insisting that “no international body has the audacity to instruct our national judiciary” and that those who expect ECtHR rulings to bind Turkish courts as hierarchical decisions “can only be acting with a colonial mentality.”

He warned that “as the ECtHR keeps issuing politically motivated rulings, it loses all value for Türkiye,” adding that Türkiye is being “forced to reconsider” its status under the Convention and its individual-application mechanism, and that continued “politically calculated” rulings will make this “inevitable,” potentially triggering “the collapse of the ECtHR system itself.”

This is not a cool-headed legal argument; it is a threat, explicitly evoking Russia’s 2022 expulsion and withdrawal from the Convention system as a live template.

That is precisely why this case has become a referendum on the Court’s own relevance. If a NATO member and long-standing Council of Europe founder can defy a powerful Grand Chamber ruling on a case this clear-cut, three times over, and face no meaningful consequence beyond rhetorical censure, then the entire enforcement architecture built on Article 46 is exposed as hollow.

The Committee of Ministers, the CoE’s Parliamentary Assembly, and the Court itself now have to decide whether Mammadov-style infringement proceedings, sharper political and financial pressure, or genuine suspension of voting rights are actually on the table, or whether Strasbourg will simply keep writing eloquent judgments that Ankara treats as advisory. How the EU will react is another matter of importance.

Nine years of Osman Kavala’s life are gone, and no ruling, however forcefully worded, can give them back. That irreversible loss is what makes this the most symbolic case of Europe’s number one political prisoner, and it is why the Court and the Council of Europe no longer have the luxury of dragging their feet.

If they do not act with the seriousness the Mammadov precedent demands, they will have conceded, in the starkest possible case, that their judgments are optional, and with that concession, so is their relevance.

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Initiated in October 2024 as the “Terror‑Free Turkey” process by Devlet Bahçeli, Erdoğan’s political ally and leader of the ultra‑nationalist MHP, the 12‑article law is its end‑product.

Judging by reactions from all parties and observers, it appears dictated entirely by the ruling bloc, lacking the hallmarks of genuine conflict resolution seen elsewhere.

Sui generis, it reads as a “win‑lose” arrangement rather than a “win‑win.”

While defining the PKK as a “terror organisation,” the text never mentions the “Kurdish problem.” It creates a narrow, tightly managed path from insurgency to civilian life, yet its multi‑layered conditions, selective scope and heavy securitisation leave its long‑term peace potential uncertain.

The law offers demobilisation incentives while preserving broad state discretion and excluding the conflict’s central political and symbolic figures — among them Selahattin Demirtaş, former leader of the pro‑Kurdish HDP (predecessor of today’s DEM Party), imprisoned for nearly a decade despite a European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) ruling for his release.

Nor does it mention any pardon for Abdullah Öcalan, the PKK’s jailed leader, even though the ECtHR has ruled in his favour under its “right to hope” jurisprudence.

Legally — and to the protest of independent legal experts in the country — the bill grants no classic, irreversible amnesty. Instead, it suspends prosecutions and prison sentences for certain PKK‑related offences for five to ten years; cases are dropped and sentences deemed served if no new terror‑related crime occurs in that period.

Covered offences include membership, aiding and abetting, propaganda and financing. Intentional killings, aggravated life sentences predating 2005, and senior leadership roles are excluded — explicitly leaving Öcalan and other top commanders, most based in Iraq’s Qandil mountains, outside its scope.

Implementation is strictly tied to security benchmarks: the law takes effect only once the National Security Council certifies the PKK’s full disarmament; those wishing to benefit then have six months to apply, with a monitoring board and a 17‑member parliamentary board overseeing surrender and reintegration.

Estimates suggest roughly 3,500 PKK‑linked detainees — about a third of such prisoners — could eventually see sentences suspended and gain a path to civilian life. The law also extends to parts of the broader network, including the Kurdistan Communities Union (KCK), aiming to channel cadres from Turkey, northern Iraq and Syria into legal political and social activity under close monitoring.

By design, however, it leaves untouched large segments of political prisoners convicted under expansive anti‑terror laws, along with the organisation’s historical leadership and pre‑2005 cases — reinforcing its character as a partial, conditional amnesty.

Amid deepening political and economic crisis, this ambiguous, opaque move has inevitably deepened divisions and fed suspicions that it will serve as a tool for consolidating the ruling bloc’s power — Erdoğan’s AKP and Bahçeli’s MHP.

As expected, debate has pitted Öcalan’s followers, the DEM Party and Turkish supporters of the process against sceptical independent legal experts and pundits, while also drawing renewed resistance from hard‑core Turkish nationalists.

Simplified, three camps have emerged: a vocal “yes” bloc, a nationalist “no” bloc, and a smaller sceptical media contingent arguing the move amounts to political engineering on a grand scale.

Supporters inside and outside government, often invoking the word “peace,” argue the law creates a concrete incentive for fighters and sympathisers to lay down arms, easing overcrowded prisons without altering Öcalan’s status as a lifetime prisoner.

For Ankara, this “framework law,” as it is often called, allows the state to end a costly conflict, improve its international image, and partially de‑internationalise the issue — especially in Iraq and Syria — without conceding on sovereignty or rewriting anti‑terror legislation. It includes no mention, reference, or pledge addressing the decades‑long demand for Kurdish political and cultural rights.

Kurdish critics focus mainly on this point: Öcalan and DEM face fierce criticism for reportedly abandoning a four‑decade struggle for constitutionally guaranteed rights in exchange for disarmament. Many also object that the “deal” has nothing to do with democratising Turkey, and that neither Öcalan nor his followers can claim to represent all of Turkey’s roughly 15–20 million Kurds, around a fifth of the population.

“This is a deal between the state and the PKK, nothing more” became a widely shared phrase across social media, alongside terms like “unconditional surrender” or even a cynical “euthanasia deal.”

Mainstream independent analysts, meanwhile, call the law “selective” and “limited” — a technical deferral mechanism rather than genuine political amnesty — and argue it conflicts with the constitutional principle of equal rights.

For context, DEM Party deputy and human‑rights advocate Ömer Faruk Gergerlioğlu puts the number of political prisoners in Turkey at “at least” 30,000, roughly a third linked to PKK cases and the rest a mix of Gülenists, many civil‑society figures such as Osman Kavala, and various leftist dissidents.

Independent legal experts also stress that the law entrenches the primacy of the security apparatus: National Security Council (MGK) certification, broad discretion held by two commissions of politicians and bureaucrats, and reversible sentence suspensions keep beneficiaries politically constrained for years.

From this view, the law risks co‑opting parts of the movement while neutralising its armed wing, without addressing structural issues such as sweeping terror prosecutions, language and cultural rights, local self‑government, or accountability for state abuses.

Domestically, the conditional amnesty is likely to strengthen Ankara’s ability to fragment and manage —-divide and rule—the Kurdish political landscape, while keeping the leadership question and broader constitutional demands under firm presidential control.

Its effects may extend beyond neutralising the Kurdish opposition. The process unfolded in parallel with the “legal bulldozing” of the main opposition CHP, which split as the bill took shape, giving rise to the New Party (Yeni Parti), led by Özgür Özel after his removal as CHP chairman by a court ruling. Challenged by the state and internally divided, the new party faces an uncertain path ahead.

The bill’s overwhelming passage — 468 votes in favour, 88 against, six abstentions — suggests Erdoğan has again succeeded in a wide‑ranging political manoeuvre: drawing the pro‑Kurdish DEM Party closer to the ruling bloc while dividing the main opposition, securing a path toward another election victory.

Pessimists argue the “partial amnesty law” should be read as a tool for cementing power rather than delivering “peace”, let alone political reform.

Put more mildly: whether the law becomes a stepping stone to deeper democratisation, or consolidates an “authoritarian peace” built on selective leniency and continued control, will depend on subsequent legislation, implementation practices, and the evolution of Kurdish political strategy in the post‑insurgency period.

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The deeper roots of this transformation stretch back to the Cold War, when the military discovered how useful Islam could be as a political instrument against the left and the Kurdish movement. The 1980 coup did not simply interrupt democracy; it helped lay the institutional groundwork for a more durable system of control. The 1982 constitution remains central to this story because it preserved a political order designed to prevent instability while instead reproducing it over decades.

Islam’s value as a political counterweight became increasingly visible to the Turkish military establishment in the later phases of the Cold War, when Sunni conservatism, associated with Necmettin Erbakan and the “Milli Görüş” (“National View”) tradition, was deliberately encouraged as a bulwark against the left.

Mandatory religion courses (which from the outset were mainly about Sunni version of Islam and not much else), introduced after the 1980 coup and entrenched under the 1982 constitution, were part of a broader effort to “nationalize” Islam and channel it through the state’s own apparatus, the Directorate of Religous Affairs, a purely Sunni structure, called “Diyanet”. The junta expanded its budget and remit, reinforcing its role in mosques and sermons and making state-approved religiosity an instrument of social control. It has tens of thousands of Sunni imams across the country as state employees. (All other creeds in Turkey were kept outside, unrepresented in Diyanet.)

At the same time, the generals designed Europe’s highest election threshold, 10 percent, to “stabilize” the party system and keep Kurdish left-wing formations out of parliament. Introduced in 1983, the barrier was justified in the name of order, but it backfired. The religious infrastructure built under military tutelage helped normalize public piety for a generation, while the electoral threshold amplified the seat share of any party able to cross it.

In November 2002, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) won just over 34 percent of the vote but secured around two-thirds of the seats because sixteen parties representing more than 45 percent of voters failed to enter parliament. The junta’s tools, designed to discipline society and marginalize Kurdish and Islamist currents, ended up delivering an Islamist-rooted party a commanding majority and the opportunity to remake the state.

For years, the standard global narrative cast the Turkish Armed Forces as the secular guardian and Erdoğan as the Islamist challenger. But over time, that binary eroded. In the second half of the AKP era, roughly from 2014 to 2023, a new alliance of convenience emerged between the presidency and key segments of the officer corps and security bureaucracy. As Erdoğan consolidated power, launched mass trials against alleged coup plotters, and restructured the chain of command, the top brass adapted to a reality in which their interests were better served by managing him than confronting him.

A telling example is Hagia Sophia: Turkey’s generals, long cast as the guardians of the republic’s secular order, did not utter a word when Erdoğan overrode the legacy of Atatürk and turned the monument from a museum back into a mosque in 2020. Yet it was Atatürk himself who had designated Hagia Sophia as a museum in 1934, making its reconversion not just a symbolic break with the founding republic but also a revealing test of the military elite’s professed commitment to secularism. Their silence exposed a deep hypocrisy at the top of the Turkish state, where the rhetoric of guardianship has too often collapsed into selective caution and political convenience.

This convergence produced a state project that keeps Turkey in diplomatic limbo: simultaneously a friend and a foe of the West, indispensable inside NATO yet unpredictable. The clearest symbol was the purchase of the Russian S-400 air-defense system, which triggered Turkey’s expulsion from the F-35 program and U.S. sanctions, even as Ankara defended the decision as a sovereign choice that would not be integrated into NATO networks.

The failed coup attempt of July 15, 2016, became the decisive turning point. The night itself was chaotic and involved different factions, but its outcome was a clear victory for Erdoğan’s camp and for the bureaucracy that chose to stand with him.

When I recently interviewed Ömer Faruk Gergerlioğlu, a deputy of the pro-Kurdish DEM Party and a human-rights defender, a striking picture emerged. Gergerlioğlu was the only deputy who insisted on probing the deeper background of the coup attempt. Defying the official narrative that it was solely the work of the Gülen movement, he visited prisons and spoke with dozens of senior officers accused of plotting the putsch.

What he told me suggested a narrowly contained uprising marked by a chaotic choreography of betrayals, deceptions, informants, and defections. As chaos reigned in the streets, officers from different backgrounds — Kemalists, ultra-nationalists, social democrats, and “Gülenists” — were involved in what resembled nearly a Nazi-style “night of the long knives” mise-en-scène. In other words, the army was undergoing a historic metamorphosis, and the botched coup appeared as its powerful symptom.

Under the state of emergency declared days later, the picture became clearer. The government bypassed parliament, ruled by decree, and launched vast purges across the civil service, judiciary, military, education system, and media. By mid-2017, more than 100,000 public employees had been dismissed or suspended, over 50,000 people were in pre-trial detention, and nearly 3,000 judges and prosecutors had been sacked, many of them jailed. Nearly 25,000 officers were dismissed, including 150 generals. (At that time, there were a total of 348 generals in active duty).

Hundreds of media outlets and associations were shut down, universities were closed, companies were seized, and emergency decrees permanently altered the institutional landscape.

The coup also gave momentum to Erdoğan’s longstanding project to replace Turkey’s parliamentary order with a hyper-presidential one. In April 2017, a “hurried” and narrow referendum, with around 51 percent voting “yes,” approved constitutional reforms that concentrated executive power in the presidency, weakened parliament, and abolished the office of prime minister. Most provisions took effect after the 2018 elections, locking in one-man rule under a framework justified by the need for “strong leadership” amid coup threats and regional turmoil.

The initial response to the coup — mass mobilization, defense of elected institutions, and removal of conspirators — was widely seen as justified. But it quickly became a process through which Erdoğan reshaped the very DNA of the republic’s institutions. Emergency rule normalized the suspension of basic safeguards. Decrees were used not only against those genuinely implicated in the coup but also to restructure institutions wholesale, purge critics, and cement partisan control over the judiciary, security forces, and regulatory agencies.

The atmosphere of permanent threat also helped neutralize political opposition and weaken social resistance. Once dissent could be cast as complicity with “terrorism” or coup plotting, the cost of contestation rose sharply for ordinary citizens, civil servants, journalists, and local politicians.

The result was a politics increasingly organized around the “will of Erdoğan,” not the will of the people. Power was concentrated under the guise of defending the republic, but what actually expanded was personalized rule, built on loyalist networks and emergency-born patronage. Erdoğan also cultivated the image of a defiant national leader who can mobilize crowds at will, project strength abroad, and force global actors — from the EU to NATO partners — to play by his rules. This was visible in his use of veto power and delay inside NATO on issues such as Sweden’s accession and defense planning, extracting concessions while denouncing Western double standards.

For many Western policymakers, dealing with Erdoğan has often been treated as a “bon pour l’Orient” bargain: a difficult but necessary partner whose domestic authoritarianism can be tolerated in exchange for cooperation on migration, counterterrorism, and regional stability.

But the arrangement has not been a real win-win. Erdoğan has used this permissive environment to stage a diplomatic choreography based on playing conflicting sides against one another. Turkey keeps open channels with Russia, participates in NATO missions, and at the same time frequently escalates disputes with Greece over maritime boundaries, airspace, and hydrocarbon exploration in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean.

In the Eastern Mediterranean, Ankara has pushed maximalist claims through controversial maritime agreements, such as the 2019 delimitation deal with Libya, and through draft bills seeking to formalize Turkish jurisdiction over wide areas of sea in direct conflict with Greek and Cypriot positions and EU law. Turkish exploration and drilling in contested waters have prompted repeated naval standoffs and fed the domestic narrative of “Blue Homeland.”

Turkey has also kept channels open to China and shown interest in Belt and Road projects, without aligning unequivocally with Western positions on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or sanctions regimes. This hedging has strategic logic for Ankara, but it means that Western tolerance of domestic authoritarian consolidation has not bought real alignment on hard-security or normative questions. If democracy and security are inseparable, then treating Erdoğan’s dominance as the price of keeping Turkey “on side” has clearly tilted the balance toward his concentration of power.

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Ten years after the coup attempt, the central issue is not only Erdoğan’s power but the shrinking space for the will of Turkey’s citizens as an independent political force. The challenge for both domestic opposition and international partners is to rebuild that space without undermining legitimate security cooperation.

Inside Turkey, that means insisting on constitutionalism and local democracy even under adverse conditions: defending municipal autonomy, supporting independent bar associations, journalists, and rights groups, and building coalitions that cross secular-religious and Turkish-Kurdish divides rather than reproducing old binaries. The aim should not be to romanticize opposition, but to preserve the possibility of plural politics in a system increasingly designed to suffocate it.

For the EU and NATO, it means abandoning a purely transactional reading of Turkey as a problem to be managed. Cooperation where necessary — on Black Sea security, energy corridors, and migration — should be linked transparently to human-rights benchmarks and rule-of-law standards, rather than left to ad hoc summit bargains. Judicial independence, freedom of expression, and fair elections should be treated not as secondary “values issues” but as core security interests. A Turkey whose institutions are hollowed out by personalized rule is a fragile partner, whatever short-term deals may suggest.

Ultimately, reclaiming space for the will of the Turkish people requires recognizing that the coup attempt was not only a chapter in Erdoğan’s heroic narrative but also a trauma that was instrumentalized to reshape the republic’s DNA. A decade on, the choice is no longer between secular generals and an elected Islamist leader, but between a deeply personalized, militarized system in diplomatic limbo and the possibility — still present in society — of a Turkey that can reconcile pluralism with genuine democratic governance.

The West’s task is not to choose Erdoğan and the system he has built around his persona, or his opponents; but to stop confusing his victories with Turkey’s fate and to structure its relations in ways that finally respect the country’s citizens as political subjects in their own right.

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He also sat, smiling, while Trump called Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan “a great leader, a very strong person” and bragged that “everything I’ve ever asked from him, he’s done.” Picking up where Trump left off, Rutte showered the Ankara regime with accolades for its growing military-industrial sector.

One question, apparently, did not arise: what exactly Erdoğan’s government had been doing to the capital, Ankara—and in general to Turkey— and Turkish citizens, in the days before this very performance?

No surprise: because Turkish journalist asking a “soft” question in the WH was apparently “selected” from the pro-government Turkish media. Another non-surprise: Rutte is known to be a top-appeaser of Turkey’s iron-fisted president. (When Erdoğan in 2017 had called the Dutch government “Nazi remnants” and “fascists, Rutte chose to “bow”, saying he “understood” Turkish anger, and stressed that relations should remain as good as possible.)

Since mid-June, Ankara has been transformed into something resembling a city under “de-facto martial law”. Seventy thousand uniformed and plainclothes police officers and gendarmerie personnel are being deployed for the July 7-8 NATO summit.

A roughly five-kilometre radius around the Presidential Complex—the summit venue—has been closed to traffic. Facial-recognition cameras have been installed across crowded areas of the capital. The Ankara Governor’s Office has banned all public gatherings, demonstrations, sit-ins, hunger strikes, rallies, leafleting, and even concerts from June 28 until July 10—a sweep lasting nearly two weeks.

Tree branches were cut in the name of “security.” Central-district public sector employees have been placed on administrative leave simply to reduce traffic. Allied governments have reportedly been asked to prevent individuals flagged in intelligence reports from even travelling to Turkey. At home, arrests of “potential noise-makers” have become also part of the dark choreography.

Make no mistake: we are not talking about Turkmenistan, but Turkey—a NATO member and, supposedly, part of a family of democracies with a functioning rule of law.”

As a journalist for over four decades, I have often covered such major international events — including the 2004 NATO Summit in Istanbul, for CNN. I have never witnessed such a hair-raising scene. This is not about security. This is the anatomy of a government holding its breath in fear of its own citizens, but also testing how far its will can be accepted by its democratic allies.

On the morning of June 23, doors were kicked down across Ankara. Police and gendarmerie, armed with warrants issued by the Ankara prosecutor’s office, detained 226 people—trade unionists, academics, lawyers, and journalists. As of this writing, 178 of those were arrested and sent to prison. The reason for the crackdown? To “decipher the action and activities of terrorist organizations.”

Among those sent before a judge for formal arrest were members of TEMA, Turkey’s leading environmental foundation and a civic organisation dedicated to fighting soil erosion and protecting forests. Volunteers aged between 60 and 79 were taken to the counter-terrorism branch and asked—without irony—whether they had “code names” and whether they had received armed military training. Six TEMA members were among those arrested, including the foundation’s Ankara representative.

There were others: an economics lecturer from Ankara University’s Faculty of Political Science—who, in yet another irony, is the daughter of an ex-general retired from the army’s intelligence branch.

When lawyers rushed to the counter-terrorism branch to represent their clients, one lawyer and one client were beaten by police officers. The Ankara Bar Association official who arrived to document the violence was not allowed inside. Turkey’s public sector union confederation, KESK, called it plainly: a de-facto state of emergency.

If the arrests were shocking, what followed regarding the press was almost surreal. Dozens of Turkish journalists and several independent media outlets—including the historic ANKA News Agency, the dailies Cumhuriyet, Sözcü, Nefes, and a number of online outlets were denied accreditation for the NATO summit.

When pressed for an explanation, Allison Hart, NATO’s spokesperson, provided one of the most extraordinary statements in the organisation’s recent history:

“Accreditation decisions for summits held outside NATO headquarters are based on “the host nation’s assessments.”

In other words, NATO outsourced the question of who gets to cover NATO to Erdoğan’s government. It is worth to remember that Turkey ranks 163rd out of 180 countries in the 2026 World Press Freedom Index prepared by Reporters Without Borders (RSF), falling from 159th place last year.

The Turkish Journalists Association (TGC) did not mince words:

“With this decision, NATO has also violated the principles of ‘democracy, individual freedom and the rule of law’ emphasised in its founding treaty.”

Indeed, the preamble of the North Atlantic Treaty states that its parties are determined “to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilisation of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law.”

I am no longer certain whether or not Mark Rutte is aware of this key phrase. Perhaps someone should place the treaty on the Secretary General’s desk. Every word of that sentence is being violated in Ankara these days, in preparation for a summit that claims “to celebrate the alliance’s unity and values.”

Rutte may need to consult senior Turkish diplomat Namık Tan, who has witnessed 32 NATO summits across his career.

Tan was unequivocal:

“Never in the history of the Alliance have we seen security measures as suffocating as those being taken in Ankara. Imposing anti-democratic bans on your own people for a NATO summit is, above all, incompatible with alliance membership.”

Another Turkish diplomat, former Ambassador Hakan Okçal —who was in the organizational team for 2004 NATO Summit in Istanbul alongside Tan— went further. He called on all journalists denied accreditation to mobilise—through their national unions and international organisations such as RSF, IFJ, and IPI—to protest, publish collective declarations, set up stands in Brussels, and pursue legal action against NATO before international judicial bodies.

His call should be answered—loudly. Our job is to inform freely, and hold powers to account. European journalist colleagues should ask the former Prime Minister of the Netherlands the questions he really needs to answer.

How would he react, for example, if The Hague or Amsterdam were declared a “red zone” with arbitrary arrests and accreditation bans for, say, Dutch journalists?

How can this be compatible with NATO’s Treaty, when a member state arrests elected representatives of the main opposition party and keeps for nine years (and counting) major civil society figure like Osman Kavala — a laureate of the Council of Europe’s Václav Havel Prize, in solitary confinement?

Does the name Havel and his struggle for freedom ring a bell for Rutte? Is the Secretary General aware that continued silence on key freedoms and rights issues of the host state come to mean consent for oppression, and will be perceived as yet another carte blanche for continuing on that path?

For the academics, union officials, elderly environmentalists, lawyers, and independent journalists caught in Ankara’s dragnet this week, Rutte’s indifference carries a far more immediate cost than anything else.

Does NATO still stand for a single shred of freedom, or is it—as Rutte implied it to be—solely a cynical arms-trade office?

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Vice President J.D. Vance, added that Trump asked his team to “run the traps” on the legal certifications needed, but he emphasized that “this is really a congressional thing,” implicitly acknowledging that statutory barriers exist.

So, what is cooking? What could the “gift bag” contain, and what will it lack? The instant question Trump’s statement brings to mind is whether or not he could use his executive power—as he did in the arms package sales to the UAE and the Gulf states—to somewhat bypass the ever-hesitant Congress.

Allow me to share some analysis—based on open sources—and a few scenarios regarding the complex relationship that has kept the U.S.–Turkey–NATO triangle in limbo for nearly a decade, explained in plain English.

Turkey was formally removed from the F‑35 Joint Strike Fighter program in 2019 after purchasing the Russian S‑400 air‑defense system. (This was the result of a fierce implusive act by Ankara, driven by Erdoğan’s perception that the shadow of “the West” lay behind the botched 2016 coup.)

The removal, regardless, occurred because U.S. officials judged the S‑400 to be a threat to the F‑35’s stealth secrets.

In December 2020, the U.S. sanctioned Turkey’s defense procurement agency, SSB, under CAATSA (the “Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act”) for the S‑400 purchase. The sanctions included a ban on export licenses to SSB and asset and visa restrictions on its leadership.

The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) then drew a very hard legal line: Its Section 1245 prohibits the transfer of F‑35 aircraft, parts, technical data, and support to Turkey unless the Secretaries of State and Defense certify in writing that Turkey “no longer possesses” the S‑400 and has given credible assurances it will not acquire similar Russian systems again.

This NDAA restriction is mandatory: without the certification that the S‑400 is gone, the White House lacks the legal authority to send the jets, even if the President personally wants to.

Think‑tank and congressional voices have responded by reminding everyone that current law flatly bars F‑35 transfers to Turkey as long as the S‑400 is present in the picture, warning Congress not to allow any backdoor erosion of this red line.

Until now, President Erdoğan has staunchly refused to comply, preferring a long-distance tightrope walk between Washington and Moscow.

So, back to the question: would Trump be able to resort to his executive power to fill the “gift bag”?

This is where the trickiest part starts. Let us remember what happened in the past. In 2019, Trump’s State Department used the Arms Export Control Act (AECA) emergency clause to push through roughly $8.1 billion in arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the UAE, citing Iranian threats to declare an “emergency” and bypass the usual prior congressional review.

Congress responded with multiple resolutions of disapproval against these Gulf arms packages, but Trump vetoed them, and the votes to override his veto fell short—so the sales went ahead despite significant bipartisan opposition.

Later, as part of the Abraham Accords, the administration notified Congress of a proposed sale of advanced armed drones and F‑35s to the UAE. There, too, Senate attempts to block the F‑35 and drone deal failed, leaving the administration’s plan intact.

The key point in the whole affair is this: in the Saudi/UAE cases, Trump exploited AECA emergency powers and the presidential veto, but he was operating within a legal framework that still allowed arms sales if Congress could not muster a two‑thirds override, rather than defying a specific statutory ban like the one NDAA Section 1245 imposes on Turkey.

What are, then, Trump’s formal tools without new legislation?

Under the Arms Export Control Act (AECA), the President can:

• Notify Congress of a proposed major arms sale and proceed if Congress does not pass a resolution of disapproval within the statutory period.

• Declare an “emergency” to shorten or bypass the usual waiting period, as the State Department did for Saudi Arabia and the UAE in 2019, then veto any subsequent resolutions of disapproval and rely on Congress failing to override.

However, the AECA does “not” let him override an explicit ban written into other statutes. It governs only “procedure”, not the core eligibility rules Congress has since set for Turkey and the F‑35.

CAATSA compels sanctions for significant transactions with Russia’s defense sector but contains waiver or delay mechanisms if the President certifies that waiving sanctions is in the U.S. national security interest and reports to Congress.

Ever willing to be helpful to his “dear friend” Erdoğan, Trump used delay tactics before sanctions were finally imposed on Turkey in December 2020. However, once the CAATSA sanctions and the NDAA were in force, the F‑35 exclusion was legally reinforced. Waiving CAATSA alone would not automatically reopen the F‑35 pipeline.

The only direct legal path under current law is for State and Defense to certify that Turkey no longer possesses the S‑400 and, on top of that, will not reacquire similar Russian systems. While there is some room for the White House interpretation of what “possesses” means, that interpretation would be heavily scrutinized by Congress — and the courts.

In practice, Trump can lean on lawyers to explore narrow interpretations (for example, if the S‑400 is dismantled, removed from Turkish territory, or placed under U.S. custody), but any certification that looks like a legal fiction would invite lawsuits, congressional holds, and new legislative blocks.

For both leaders, time is of the essence. Erdoğan wants to secure a resurgence of his popularity as he engineers the political stage for a new presidential term in the elections next year or in early 2028. He sees his forged alliance with Trump as a primary asset for his further ambitions to cement a waterproof autocracy.

For Trump, a foreign policy success story in the Middle East is crucial before the midterms. For both leaders, November seems to be a soft deadline to complete action. If Trump loses control of the House, progress on the issue will face a steep uphill path.

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Currently, there are six scenarios.

Scenario 1: “Clean compliance” – Turkey divests the S‑400

Trump may use his leverage and promise of jets to push Erdoğan to:

• Remove the S‑400 from Turkish territory—return it to Russia, transfer it to a third country, or dismantle it under verifiable U.S./NATO monitoring.

• Sign binding assurances not to buy Russian systems that could threaten F‑35 secrets in the future (and move toward a U.S. or NATO‑compatible air defense solution, e.g., the Patriot system).

Once that is done, State and Defense could credibly certify compliance, CAATSA sanctions on SSB could be lifted or waived, and the administration could re‑notify F‑35 transfers to Turkey, daring Congress to pass—and override—resolutions of disapproval.

This scenario would probably still face stiff bipartisan resistance, but the legal foundation would be solid: the statutory precondition (no S‑400s) would be met, so the contest would shift back to ordinary arms‑sales politics, back to business as usual.

Scenario 2: “Creative” certification, while S‑400 is sidelined

A more aggressive legal strategy would be to claim that Turkey “no longer possesses” the S‑400 in a functional sense, even if the hardware remains physically in-country. The system could be placed in sealed storage under U.S./NATO supervision, completely disconnected from any Turkish or NATO air‑defense network. Furthermore, sensitive radar and software components would be removed or transferred, with Turkey pledging not to activate the system again.

Trump’s team could argue that such a configuration meets statutory intent and use that to justify certification, then move to restart F‑35 transfers.

But the language in the NDAA (“no longer possesses the S‑400”) is quite strict, and hawkish members in both parties would likely challenge any “creative” interpretation as contrary to Congress’s intent, responding with new explicit bans, holds, or litigation.

Politically, this scenario risks a clash not only with Democrats, but also with Republicans who have previously backed the F‑35 red line on Turkey, potentially fracturing Trump’s own coalition in the Senate.

Scenario 3: Trying to bypass Congress

Trump could try to “recycle” his Gulf precedent:

• Use AECA emergency authorities to fast‑track a Turkey package or to move jets to another country (e.g., a NATO ally) that would then cooperate with Turkey, portraying this as urgent for deterrence against Russia or Iran.

• Veto any disapproval resolutions and rely on Senate Republicans plus some Democrats to prevent a two‑thirds override, as happened with the Saudi and UAE sales.

The problem here is that any scheme designed to filter jets indirectly to Ankara would be seen as an attempt to nullify Congress’s law. Congressional committees already use holds to block F‑35 deliveries even to Turkey‑friendly arrangements, and senior Republicans have kept a strong hold on any F‑35 movement to Turkey despite Erdoğan’s intense lobbying.

Scenario 4: Everything but the F‑35

Trump can much more easily deliver a package that stops short of actual F‑35 jets.

• F‑110 engines and other components already in U.S. warehouses or destined for allied fleets.

• Additional F‑16 Block aircraft, modernization kits, munitions, and other support already under discussion or approved for Turkey.

These items are subject to CAATSA considerations but are not covered by the specific F‑35 statutory ban. Trump can use emergency notifications and vetoes to facilitate them over congressional objections, just as he did for Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

Such a partial “gift bag” allows Trump to claim he is repairing relations and strengthening NATO’s southern flank, tiding things over until the S‑400 issue is formally resolved.

So far, this is scenario that is linked to the “gift bag”.

Scenario 5: “Negotiated” legislative change

The administration could bargain with congressional leaders to amend or repeal NDAA Section 1245, trading concessions (tighter reporting requirements, limits on Turkish basing or technology access, or parallel sanctions on Russia) for a conditional reopening of F‑35 transfers. This might be packaged within a broader NATO or Ukraine‑related bill, or tied to a larger bargain on Middle East policy, echoing how the UAE F‑35 deal was embedded in the Abraham Accords framework.

Given the strong record of bipartisan criticism of Turkey, such a change would be a political uphill battle. However, Trump could try to frame it as necessary to keep Turkey anchored in NATO—and away from Russia and Iran.

If the legislation changes, Trump’s executive tools—AECA emergency powers, vetoes, and CAATSA waivers—could then operate in a more permissive environment, making a future F‑35 transfer legally viable.

Scenario 6: Strategic linkage and “gradualism”

Finally, Trump could treat the F‑35 issue as part of a wider “grand bargain”:

• Use the promise of jets and engines as leverage for Turkish cooperation on issues like Black Sea access, Syria, or Iran sanctions, while moving step‑by-step: first F‑16 upgrades and engines, then industrial participation, and only much later the aircraft themselves.

• With each step, push Ankara closer to Western air‑defense standards and away from operational use of the S‑400, preparing the ground for eventual certification that the system is effectively gone or irrelevant.

This “gradualist” approach does not in itself solve the legal problem, but it buys time. It lets Trump show Erdoğan tangible benefits short of F‑35s while giving Congress multiple chokepoints to react if it believes the S‑400 red line is being eroded.

So, in conclusion, this much can be said: compared with the UAE case—where Trump used AECA emergency powers and vetoes to push arms deals through a hostile Congress—the Turkey/F‑35 problem is constrained by a specific statutory prohibition that ties F‑35 transfers to the fate of the S‑400, making a pure “executive bypass” much harder.

In addition to the race against time, there is also the messy issue of the Eastern Mediterranean. Turkey’s “Blue Homeland” doctrine and its consequential moves—along with offensive, irredentist rhetoric regarding some Aegean islands—has greatly irked Athens —another NATO ally— leading to a military buildup and new alliance formations against Ankara. In this context, Greece will definitely continue to insist on setting strict guarantees against hostile, ally-to-ally actions. Israel, currently in a massive geopolitical feud with Turkey, will not stand idly by in the diplomatic tug of war.

Trump’s realistic playbook for a NATO “gift bag” therefore revolves around: inducing some form of S‑400 divestment or deactivation; pursuing creative but risky legal certifications; offering partial compensation via F‑16s, engines, and other systems; pushing Ankara strictly to behave in line with NATO strategies; and, in the longer‑term, reshaping the law with Congress rather than simply vaulting over it.

(Sources: Congress, State Department, Reuters, CBS, ABC, AP)

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And a new book nails it perfectly, placing it in context.

When the Soviet bloc collapsed, it did not simply release democracies into the world. It released “institutions without institutional culture”, states without civic norms, and oligarchic networks that had learned, over decades, to operate in the shadow economy of coercion and loyalty.

The result was not the liberal order that Western policymakers imagined. It was the fusion of state power and criminal logic that scholars would come to call “kleptocracy” — but which Barbara McQuade, a former federal prosecutor with decades of experience dismantling organized crime networks —in Michigan, U.S.A.— with the straight vocabulary of a prosecutor, calls mob-style government.

The template crystallized first in the Eastern sphere. Two states, in particular, stood out as interesting, because both have had political parties having the role as opposition.

Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus perfected the model of the “protection racket state”: loyalty purchased through patronage, dissent crushed through extrajudicial violence, and elections performed as rituals of submission rather than exercises in choice. In Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev inherited and refined a system where the distinction between the ruling family and the national treasury was largely administrative.

Both leaders operated from a playbook that organized crime theorists would recognize gradually: control the courts, own the media, and ensure that everyone in proximity to power has enough to lose that they will never risk betraying you.

This was what we witnessed on the post-Soviet side. But a similar pattern also became gradually visible elsewhere. It flourished also on the other side of the Cold War map, perhaps as expected —or feared— it would, from Turkey, whose deficit of democracy was constant throughout the decades since it became a member of NATO.

“The Fix: Saving America from the Corruption of a Mob-Style Government” (Seven Stories Press, 2026) is already a New York Times bestseller, and the timing of its publication feels less like coincidence than like diagnosis.

What McQuade is doing — and what makes the book essential reading well beyond American borders — is giving a name and a structure to this global pattern that has been building during the past three decades. It sheds powerful light on how thuggery has gained mass support and became an organic part of government methodology.

There is a scene near the opening of classic movie, “The Godfather”, that Barbara McQuade returns to more than once in her book. Don Corleone grants a favor, then turns to the supplicant with a slow, unhurried calm:

“Someday — and that day may never come — I’ll call upon you to do a service for me.”

McQuade argues that this is not fiction. It is a precise description of how Donald Trump governs. “Every time someone does something for him,whether it’s a favor or something else, there’s always an expectation of a return,” ” she writes: the Corleone model has become the operating system of American power .

The book gradually shifts to global context. What happened in the decade after 2010 was not the spread of authoritarianism to new territories — it was, shall we say, its “migration upward” through democratic legitimacy.

McQuade distills this pattern into what she calls the “three C’s” of mob-style governance: “corruption, cruelty, and chaos”. These are not side effects or failures of administration. They are “instruments”.

Corruption binds subordinates through shared complicity. Cruelty —which is an off-shoot of the typical mafia code, “vindictiveness”—- demonstrates that the rules protecting ordinary citizens do not apply to power. And chaos is the fog of war that prevents accountability from ever gaining traction.

I would add another dimension to the behavioral patterns of these types of leaders: how they’ve managed to minimize the format of meetings on the international stage. Nearly always, they prefer to meet person-to-person, sidelining institutions, with full focus on the mafia-style code of honor in “personal confidence building.”

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What “The Fix” does with particular force is refuse the American exceptionalist escape route — the comfortable fiction that what happened in Ankara or Minsk could not happen in Washington. Drawing on her experience prosecuting organized crime, McQuade shows how Trump imported his methods not from foreign autocrats but from the domestic tradition of Roy Cohn, his longtime legal enforcer and maestro of the counter-punch. “He learned from Cohn,” she writes, “that the way to win is to attack, attack, attack — never admit, never apologize, and always demand loyalty in return.”

I would disagree with the part of “ not from foreign autocrats”, but that, a little later.

In the case of Turkey, Erdoğan offered the crucial proof of concept: a leader elected through genuine democratic competition who then systematically dismantled every institution designed to constrain him. The media was captured or broken, the judiciary was packed, and the security services were purged into personal instruments. What remained was the “form” of democracy — elections, a rubber-stamp parliament, under an ill-written constitution — hollowed out and refilled with the substance of organized dominance, based on absolutely loyalty.

The parallels to Erdoğan’s systematic legal persecution of opponents, or to Lukashenko’s use of the state apparatus to punish critics, are not coincidental. They are structural. They represent convergent evolution toward the same adaptive solution: “use power to protect power”.

The Guardian’s recent review calls the book “a piercing exposé of how Trump is eroding democracy by turning the US into a mafia state.” That framing, while accurate, is perhaps too America-centric. The more unsettling argument McQuade’s evidence supports is that Trump did not “turn” the US into a mafia state — he “revealed” how far a liberal democracy could travel in that direction before its citizens recognized the destination.

But Erdoğan preceded Trump and others —like Orban, or even Bolsonaro— by skillfully bulldozing his way into autocracy, thereby setting templates for like-minded strongmen to copy and paste. Trump’s openly declared admiration for Erdoğan is rather revealing in this context. Thus, I’d argue that Trump and his closed circle may have studied the Turkish example (or the Russian one) carefully.

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Several important books have explored adjacent terrain, although I find McQuade’s angle much more lucid for grasping the developments on a personal, psychological level: Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s “How Democracies Die” (2018) documented the incremental, legalistic dismantling of democratic norms; Timothy Snyder’s “On Tyranny” offered a historian’s urgent handbook for resistance. More recently, Anne Applebaum’s “Autocracy, Inc.” (2024) mapped the transnational *infrastructure* of authoritarian mutual support — the money flows, the PR firms, the lawyers, the surveillance technology that autocrats share and sell to one another.

McQuade ends with reform proposals rather than despair, and her faith in constitutional remedies is genuine, if tested. But the book’s most lasting contribution may be conceptual: it gives readers — whether in Baku or Minsk, Ankara or Washington — a common vocabulary for what they have been watching. The Fix, as she titles it, has been in for a long time. The question now is whether enough people recognize it in time to undo it.

Barbara McQuade, The Fix: Saving America from the Corruption of a Mob-Style Government (Seven Stories Press, 2026)

Regardless of how you subscribe, I thank you for reading.

As a consequence, Turkey remained both inside and outside its key role as a member of NATO, keeping the gates open to drift “on its own”; thus becoming, over time, unstable and unreliable.

Moreover, over the past decade, the major choices of the Erdoğan regime have served as a source of inspiration for the rise of far-right populists and “wanna-be” autocrats within the Western system—such as Viktor Orbán—and, bizarrely enough, have drawn admiration from the “leader of the free world,” President Donald Trump.

Following the moves to decapitate Turkey’s main opposition party, the CHP, its removed elected leader Özgür Özel touched on this issue, albeit tangentially, in an op-ed for the Newsweek.

Özel argued the following:

“Turkey’s democratic crisis has evolved into something much larger. It is now becoming a security crisis with implications far beyond our borders. What is unfolding in Turkey today should concern not only those who care about democracy, but also those who care about the long-term stability of Europe, NATO, the Black Sea region, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Middle East.

The reason is simple: Turkey is too strategically important to become politically unstable.

If current trends continue, Turkey risks becoming something unprecedented in NATO’s history: a strategically indispensable member that no longer functions as a democracy, while millions of its citizens grow increasingly dissatisfied with a political and economic order they have no peaceful democratic means to change. This would not merely be a domestic crisis. It would be a profound security challenge.

The outcome could establish a precedent with consequences far beyond our borders, encouraging either democratic renewal or further authoritarian consolidation across a region already under immense strain.”

I have long reflected on the root causes behind why Turkey, about a dozen years ago, abandoned its quest for EU membership—and not only reverted to its origins as an authoritarian state, but has now gone further down, evolving into what can be described as a “closed autocracy,” reminiscent of Azerbaijani or even Belarusian models.

I recently heard an astute analysis that overlapped with my own reflections in an interview with Steven Cook —senior fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations in Washington DC— whom I consider one of the sharpest and most forthright observers of Turkey and the Middle East.

Cook argued the following:

“When NATO was founded in the early 1950s, there was no specific mention in its founding articles about democracy. Turkey and Greece joined in 1952, and when the founders looked at Turkey, they regarded Turks as ‘secularists,’ meaning ‘democrats,’ which we know was not the case. But they were anti-communists, and there was no real consideration of the form of government. It was simply assumed that this was a Western democratic alliance defending against a non-democratic communist bloc.

Then, after the fall of the Soviet Union, when all the Warsaw Pact members wanted to join, new provisions about democracy, freedom, and the rule of law were introduced.

But these did not apply retroactively to existing members; they were designed for new entrants. There was no mechanism to expel any member of NATO, even if it was non-democratic, like Turkey. That was the broader picture—how NATO was founded and what assumptions underpinned it at the time.”

These are the points often missed by the pundits inside Turkey.

For many of them, it is all about Erdoğan. Erdoğan here, Erdoğan there… Is it? When Erdoğan leaves the stage, will anything change — considering the massive regime shift since 2017?

Personal rule, populist majoritarianism, institutional hollowing… It is tempting to explain Turkey’s present authoritarian consolidation through the familiar vocabulary of “Erdoğanism”(!) A hugely misleading term, because it presumes that the current “system” is all about Erdoğan. It is not: Erdoğan is only “ecumenical” in it.

The root causes of Turkey’s systemic crisis lie in a longer trajectory—one in which democratization was persistently deferred, and in which external alliances reduced the cost of that deferral.

NATO sits uncomfortably at the center of this story.

From the early Cold War onward, Turkey’s geostrategic indispensability translated into political indulgence. As the alliance’s southeastern anchor, bordering the Soviet sphere and projecting into the Middle East, Turkey became too valuable to fail—and, crucially, too valuable to discipline.

The implicit bargain held: strategic loyalty in exchange for tolerance of internal shortcomings.

This bargain did more than protect Turkey; it shaped it.

NATO’s sustained military cooperation and political backing reinforced the Turkish armed forces as a dominant, self-assured ruling class. Over time, the military did not simply intervene in politics—it structured the limits of politics itself. Acting as a tutelary force, it drew red lines around ideology, identity and dissent, systematically constraining pluralism, particularly on the left and among Kurdish political movements.

The coups of 1960, 1971, and especially 1980 were not deviations but mechanisms of control. The 1980 intervention, with its mass repression, destruction of political life, and sweeping human rights violations, was met with striking restraint by NATO allies.

Even more consequential was the acceptance of the 1982 constitution, which codified a restricted democracy under military oversight. A system designed to contain society, not represent it, was also normalized within the Western alliance.

The end of the Cold War might have marked a rupture, many hoped. Turkey’s record with its “inner guardian core”, referred as a “deep state” was intact. Gladio formations in Italy, Greece etc were dismantled. The time had finally come for Ankara to pull its act together.

It did not.

Instead, Turkey’s military elite adapted by resisting the very global transformations reshaping other NATO peripheries. Their message was explicit and consistent:

Turkey’s conditions were “exceptional,” its security challenges unique, its political structure not subject to external prescriptions.

In effect: do not expect anything, do not touch us, do not force us, let us remain as we are.

This insistence carried through the 1990s.

Despite the global wave of democratization, Turkey’s political field remained tightly controlled. State-sponsored violence escalated in response to the PKK uprising. Extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, and systematic abuses became structural features rather than aberrations.

Kurdish demands for collective rights were denied. Freedom of expression was curtailed through relentless prosecutions, media outlets faced sustained pressure, and political competition often functioned as little more than managed pluralism.

Yet these patterns were largely subordinated, in Western eyes, to geopolitical considerations.

Turkey remained a strategic asset—now in a post-Soviet landscape marked by instability in the Balkans, the Caucasus, and the Middle East. Once again, democratic deficiencies were acknowledged, but not prioritized. The result was a continuation of the same asymmetry: electoral politics without full democratic substance.

This distorted environment produced its own political consequences.

The secular center-right, long a pillar of the system, became increasingly hollowed out—its legitimacy eroded by corruption, its autonomy constrained by military tutelage, its ideological coherence weakened.

In this vacuum, an alternative political force began to consolidate: a disciplined Islamist movement —whose hidden agenda proved to be resilient— that would eventually take institutional form as the AKP. Erdoğan’s rise must be understood within this context—but so must his transformation.

A keen observer of the international system, Erdoğan initially leveraged Western expectations to weaken military tutelage, presenting himself as a reformer aligned with European norms. But he also grasped something more structural: that the West’s commitment to democracy in Turkey had always been conditional, selective, and ultimately secondary to strategic concerns.

When he pivoted toward authoritarian consolidation, he did so within a permissive environment.

Crucially, this shift was not carried out alone. Segments of the old state—nationalist bureaucratic and security elites, many of them historically skeptical of the West—aligned with Erdoğan from 2015 elections on, in dismantling what remained of Turkey’s fragile semi-democratic order.

The methods were familiar in logic if not in form: capturing media, boosting polarisation, waging a Kulturkampf, subordinating the judiciary, demonisation and incarceration of dissidents, neutralising the opposition, and now, redefining the boundaries of legitimate politics.

And once again, the reaction from NATO was measured, cautious, and ultimately limited. And the EU had for long lost leverage; it had been lost in a reverse transition.

Here the historical continuity becomes strong. Just as Cold War Turkey’s authoritarian reflexes were accommodated in the name of stability, Erdoğan’s Turkey has been treated through a similar lens—criticized, but rarely confronted in ways that would alter the underlying trajectory. Strategic imperatives, from migration management to regional security, continue to outweigh democratic concerns.

Each time he took a step forward, Erdoğan saw his moves confirmed.

But this is not only Turkey’s story anymore.

Erdoğan’s model —enhanced authoritarianism built on the erosion of checks and balances and the rule of law— has resonated beyond Turkey’s borders. Within NATO itself, Viktor Orbán’s Hungary has drawn clear lessons, adapting elements of this playbook to its own context. The alliance, once again, has struggled to respond decisively to democratic backsliding within its ranks. Thanks to the EU dynamic, Orban was cast out of the dark game.

The risk of contagion, however, is there.

If Turkey’s current trajectory continues to be observed with the same strategic tolerance that characterized earlier decades, its model may further normalize a form of governance that empties democracy from within while preserving its outward shell. What was once justified as Cold War necessity risks becoming a precedent for the present.

This is, in essence, the warning now emerging —however belatedly— from within the main opposition. Özel’s recent framing points to a realization long deferred: that the country’s democratic erosion cannot be understood solely as an internal deviation, but must also be read in light of an external system that repeatedly deprioritized democratic substance.

Turkey’s crisis is not an isolated anomaly but the outcome of a decades-long equilibrium between domestic constraints and international permissiveness. Its system stands as a role model.

And unless that equilibrium is broken, the trajectory it has produced may prove not only durable—but replicable.

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The decision triggers Özel’s removal from the party leadership he has held since defeating longtime chairman Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu at that congress.

Markets responded immediately: the Istanbul stock exchange registered a sharp selloff, continuing a pattern of financial shock that has accompanied each successive judicial blow against the CHP.

The background to today’s ruling is a methodical, staged, deliberate legal campaign. In September 2025, a court annulled the CHP’s Istanbul provincial congress, removed Istanbul chair Özgür Çelik and 195 other officials, and installed an interim caretaker committee — causing Turkey’s BIST100 to drop more than 5%. That ruling was widely read at the time as a test run and a signal of what was coming for the national stage.

A parallel case targeting the 2023 national congress, on grounds of alleged vote-buying and procedural misconduct, had been adjourned repeatedly under enormous public pressure before finally being dismissed at first instance in October 2025 — a moment of short-lived relief — on the grounds that the CHP’s extraordinary congress of September 21, 2025, which had preemptively re-elected Özel, had rendered the case “moot.”

Today’s appeals court ruling reverses that decision entirely, reinstating the annulment and removing the safeguard the CHP had tried to build for itself. The legal basis is the allegation of procedural violations and vote-buying at the November 2023 congress — claims the CHP has consistently and categorically rejected as politically fabricated.

Crucially, legal experts had long pointed out that under Turkey’s own constitution, only the Supreme Electoral Council — not the civil courts — holds jurisdiction over internal party elections; the council had already validated Özel’s election. That constitutional argument has now been swept aside.

This Is No Longer a Crisis of Democracy — It Is Its Demolition

What we are witnessing in Turkey today is not democracy under stress — it is democracy’s deliberate, calculated demolition, carried out in plain sight and dressed in the language of procedure and legality.

Call it what it is: the completion of a self-coup. Not the dramatic, overnight seizure of power that history usually associates with the word, but something more insidious — a slow-motion constitutional strangulation, engineered through captured courts, hollowed institutions, and the weaponization of legality itself against the rule of law.

When courts remove opposition leaders whom polls show would defeat Erdoğan’s AKP in a free election, the pretence is over.

The implications are structural and, in the short term, irreversible.

Here is how I see it:

• Judicial capture is now total. The appeals court’s reversal of a lower court’s own dismissal — issued specifically because the CHP had held a new congress to protect itself — signals that no procedural safeguard the opposition constructs will be permitted to stand. The courts are not interpreting law; they are executing political instructions.

• Electoral competition is being criminalised by proxy. With İmamoğlu imprisoned and stripped of his university degree, blocking his presidential candidacy, and Özel now judicially removed from the chairmanship, the regime has effectively decapitated the opposition’s entire leadership tier at once.

• Parliament is being reduced to decoration. A legislature whose largest opposition party can have its elected leadership annulled by a civil court acting beyond its constitutional remit is not a parliament — it is a managed performance.

• The constitution itself is being selectively voided. When courts exceed the jurisdictional limits set by the constitution — limits that explicitly reserve party-election oversight for the Supreme Electoral Council — and suffer no institutional consequence, the constitution ceases to function as a constraint on power.

What makes this moment uniquely dangerous is that it has been preceded by a masterclass in opposition neutralisation — and the regime deserves grim credit for its tactical precision.

The DEM Party, representing Turkey’s Kurdish political movement, has been drawn into a deliberately opaque “peace process” built around Abdullah Öcalan, jailed leader of the PKK. The bait was irresistible: after decades of armed conflict and political persecution, the promise of peace carries enormous moral weight for Kurdish communities.

But the architecture of this process has been entirely regime-controlled — no independent verification, no transparent roadmap, no international monitoring. Öcalan’s statements, delivered from the total isolation of İmralı Island, have been instrumentalised to give the regime a veneer of statesmanship while neutralising DEM as a vehicle of democratic opposition.

Initiated by Devlet Bahçeli, Erdoğan’s ultra-nationalist ally, under the slogan “terror-free Turkey,” the process has largely kept DEM occupied and diverted from Turkey’s burning issues, such as poverty and sky-high inflation. Its logic has never been hard to read: a win-lose arrangement disguised as reconciliation.

The CHP, meanwhile, has been kept on a razor’s edge for months, fractured from within, by acrimonious debates. The removal of Özel will reignite the party’s internal fault lines — between those who favour engagement and accommodation with the regime, and those committed to structural resistance.

The question of whether Kılıçdaroğlu, deeply discredited within the party, might be reinstated — or whether a regime-friendly trustee committee could be installed — now hangs openly over the party. A divided opposition fighting over its own leadership will not be fighting Erdoğan.

That is the major point.

Deposed Özel has two choices: he and his cadres can resist by entrenching themselves at party headquarters, or they can launch a new party. But, let us keep in mind that there are already files presented to Parliament about lifting the immunities of eight deputies, including Özel. There is also a court hearing scheduled in early July, about the fate of more than a dozen CHP figures, linked with Özel.

In the long term, here are the expected consequences of the massive political engineering, bearing Erdoğan’s signature:

1. CHP’s parliamentary group faces sharp internal divisions. The main opposition currently has 138 deputies. It has long been worn down by infighting between factions and interests. At least 25 of these deputies are believed to support Kılıçdaroğlu. Depending on how the situation develops, that number may rise — causing an irreversible split in Parliament. This division is part of Erdoğan’s plan, since he openly talks about reaching the critical threshold of 360 votes to declare early elections, which would give him the right to run for a new presidential term, and to trigger a referendum on constitutional amendments.

2. The 2028 election is structurally pre-decided. İmamoğlu is imprisoned and constitutionally barred. Özel is now judicially removed. The opposition enters the next presidential cycle without coherent leadership, a unified platform, or a legally protected organisational structure.

3. A trustee scenario for the CHP itself cannot be excluded. If the annulment leads to a protracted leadership vacuum, the regime has both the legal pretext and the institutional tools to push for administered management of the party — as it has already done with the CHP’s Istanbul branch.

4. For Kurdish politics, the DEM gamble may leave the movement politically spent. If the peace process collapses without binding legal guarantees — as every previous Turkish-Kurdish negotiation has — DEM will have neutralised itself as a democratic opposition force in exchange for nothing.

5. Markets will continue to price in political risk. The recurring selloff pattern shows that investors understand what analysts sometimes hesitate to say openly: judicial removal of opposition leaders is not legal normalisation — it is institutionalised instability.

6. Internationally, the response will be inadequate. Turkey’s NATO membership and the permanent fiction of EU candidacy will continue to insulate the regime from meaningful Western pressure. Strategic calculations about migration, defence, and regional stability will, as always, trump democratic principle.

A closed autocracy does not announce itself. It arrives gradually, dressed in court orders and the exhaustion of those who once resisted. Turkey’s main opposition has seen more than 20 of its mayors arrested, its Istanbul branch decapitated, and now its congress annulled, all within fourteen months.

The circuit is now complete.

I have been arguing persistently for over a decade that President Erdoğan, backed by his ally Bahçeli, is pushing Turkey toward “Azerbaijanisation”: a system in which the opposition remains dwarfed and impotent, the judiciary is instrumentalised by the autocratic rule, the media is turned into a machinery of sheer propaganda and most importantly, elections will serve as legitimization of the regime and its leadership.

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By the end of April 2026, four interlocking diplomatic moves crystallised this unsettled choreography, producing a picture that is clear in outline but fuzzy in intention.

First, the informal EU leaders’ meeting held in Cyprus on 23–24 April marked a notable sharpening of the bloc’s defence posture in the eastern Mediterranean.

Cyprus, led by President Nikos Christodoulides, pushed for the EU, with the backing of the President of France, Emmanuel Macron, to turn Article 42.7 of the TEU — the mutual defence clause, described by the latter as “undebatably clear” — into a practical, operational mechanism, using the island’s status as a frontline EU member close to the Middle East.

In parallel, France and Greece accelerated their military build‑up around the island, including the deployment of frigates, air defence systems and maritime surveillance assets, transforming the southern part of the divided Cyprus into a de facto forward platform for European power projection.

At the meeting, the EU hosted leaders and representatives from several Middle Eastern and Gulf states — Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and the Gulf Cooperation Council — signalling an effort to insulate Cyprus from Turkish pressure by weaving it into a broader regional coalition.

Turkey was invited but chose not to attend, citing non‑recognition of the Republic of Cyprus. Israel, too, was left out, although it is considered to be part of the axis taking shape: Its presence would certainly lead to a refusal by the Arab states to attend.

The essence of the meeting invites additional tension. The cumulative effect is to re‑position Ankara not as a key security partner inside the emerging EU defence architecture, but as a peripheral, problem‑causing variable to be managed around the edges.

Second, the 17–19 April Antalya Diplomacy Forum showcased an alternative, softer face of Turkish foreign policy. Organised under the theme “Navigating Uncertainty,” the forum gathered mid‑tier powers, Global South actors and regional mediators, presenting Turkey as an open hub capable of bridging spheres.

However, this image of Ankara as a central node contrasts with its increasingly constrained space in “formal‑institutional” Europe. The forum yielded symbolic capital rather than binding leverage. It was rather a showcase of connectivity, not a structural remedy for the EU‑driven squeeze.

Third, the 22–23 April signing of the Strategic Partnership Framework between Turkey and the United Kingdom added a new, bilateral lever. The agreement, negotiated by Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan and his UK counterpart, Yvette Cooper, covers defence cooperation, NATO‑aligned security, energy infrastructure and Middle Eastern stability, explicitly aiming to deepen London‑Ankara ties beyond the EU framework.

Brexit‑era Britain, seeking its own “Global Britain” profile, and Turkey, seeking ways to bypass an increasingly antagonistic EU front door, find in each other a mutually useful, if asymmetric, counterbalance to the Franco‑Greek‑Cypriot security axis.

Fourth, the European Parliament’s Security and Defence Committee (SEDE) voted on 27 April to exclude Turkey from the defence components of the Horizon Europe programme for 2028–2034, by a margin of 29–5, with one abstention.

Though the text remains in transition through the EU’s legislative process, the political signal leaves little doubt: Europe’s most ambitious research and innovation framework, when it formally includes a defence basket, will not grant Turkey access on the same footing as full members.

The move, encouraged by Cypriot MEP Costas Mavrides, reflects a broader mood in Brussels to treat Ankara as a partially unreliable defence partner and to limit technology transfer and joint capability building.

To these four elements, Ankara added a diplomatic coda: Fidan’s 29–30 April visit to Austria, where he reiterated a carefully calibrated message on EU membership. If the EU issued a clear political signal of willingness to accept Turkey as a “fellow member,” he said, Ankara would re‑evaluate its position and take concrete steps to complete the accession process.

This was a classic move to throw the ball to Brussels: a reminder that Turkey still wants the door open, while implicitly accusing Europe of closing it on political, not technical, grounds. Domestically, the line is read by many commentators as evidence that membership is not yet a dead letter, but criticism of Brussels often overshadows any self‑critical reckoning with Turkey’s own democratic backsliding and human‑rights record.

On top of this, there is much doubt that Ankara’s approach, once more to be perceived as horse‑trading based solely on its “geopolitical weight,” will create a mood of flexibility within the EU.

Underlying much of the alienating dynamic is the increasingly confrontational climate in the eastern Mediterranean. Ankara’s “Mavi Vatan” (“Blue Homeland”) doctrine, originally developed by a group of retired admirals hostile to Greece and later adopted by the government, has turned the region into a geopolitical laboratory where overlapping maritime claims and energy exploration intersect with hard‑power demonstration.

This posture, complemented by insistently nationalist rhetoric in Turkey about twelve “occupied” Greek islands (the Dodecanese), has reinforced Western fears of revisionism without delivering a stable security equilibrium. Instead, it has contributed to a feedback loop in which France, Greece and Cyprus deepen their own defence ties, and Europe grows more cautious about integrating Ankara in sensitive security projects.

In this context, it could be argued that, as the S‑400 issue has become a strategic obstacle to improving Turkish‑American relations, so have Ankara’s offensive moves in the eastern Mediterranean shattered the already sensitive ground of confidence‑building.

Yet Turkey is not passive. The UK partnership, the Antalya hub‑building and the continued claim on the EU accession process amount to a layered strategy: avoid full isolation and exploit pockets of openness within the West and the Global South. But the problem is that these strands do not yet add up to a coherent doctrine.

In essence, Ankara is trying to widen its room for manoeuvre through bilateralism and informal diplomacy while the rules‑based, institutional poles of Europe harden against it.

In the short term, the most realistic scenario is neither a full Turkish exit from the European order nor a sudden rehabilitation of the EU membership process. Instead, Turkey is likely to remain in a “liminal zone,” or, to push the point, in diplomatic terms, a “no‑man’s‑land”: engaged enough economically and strategically around the edges to matter, yet kept out of core security decision‑making and high‑end defence integration.

The current constellation — European defence ambitions, SEDE exclusion, UK balancing and Ankara’s Antalya‑style networking — suggests that Turkey’s external choreography is less about a new, grand strategic turn and more about managing a protracted, ambivalent separation from the EU’s “inner sanctum,” even as it keeps the door symbolically ajar from the Turkish side.

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On April 22, 2026, a group of 28 parliamentarians from various Council of Europe member states submitted a motion for resolution to …

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The EU, the argument goes, acts as a civilizational safety net: Fall far enough, and the net catches you.

That argument is not entirely wrong. It is, however, evasively incomplete — and using it as a universal template for understanding democratic erosion may be misleading.

The Orbán story does certainly carry a real, major lesson. Faced with suspended cohesion funds, Article 7 proceedings, and the grinding attrition of European Parliament pressure, Budapest has periodically recalculated its exposure.

Warsaw went further still: a new government began dismantling much of the judicial wreckage its predecessor had left behind. Italy’s referendum sent a clear signal that citizens, when properly mobilized across the political spectrum, will defend their constitutional architecture against executive encroachment.

In each case, the existence of an external arbiter and an engaged domestic public created enough friction to slow the authoritarian machine. The guardrails held — or at least bent without snapping.

Brazil offers a complementary lesson from outside Europe. When Bolsonaro’s supporters stormed federal buildings in January 2023, the Supreme Court did not hesitate. The media held the lines. Prosecutors moved swiftly and convictions followed. The decisive factor was not the absence of a would-be authoritarian — he had been very much present for four years — but the survival of institutions with sufficient independence to act, backed by a civil society that had not yet been fully atomized.

Democratic resilience is like a bridge: structural capital forms the steel, social capital the tension wires. Remove one, and the span falls.

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Now consider Belarus, Azerbaijan and Turkey. These are not cases of democratic backsliding that paused somewhere on the descent. They represent a qualitatively different political condition: systems in which the mechanisms of reversal have themselves been systematically and succesfully dismantled.

In Minsk, Baku and Ankara, the judiciary acts as a weapon of the state, the press is either owned outright or crushed into silence, and the opposition survives only as managed theater. The EU has no Article 7 to invoke over Aliyev, nor does the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights matter.

External pressure, without internal levers to amplify it, produces noise — not change.

Turkey sits firmly in this category. And it carries an additional layer of geopolitical insulation that makes it uniquely resistant to outside correction, and uniquely dangerous to misread.

What distinguishes President Erdoğan from the Orbáns of the world is not merely the depth of media capture, though outlets have been seized, sold to loyalists, and a tiny opposition media is kept at face value for the argument of “democratic legitimacy”. It is not merely the gutting of the judiciary — though prosecutors and judges —only a few of the professional ones remaining— who step out of line find their careers, and sometimes their freedom, disappearing.

What sets Erdoğan apart is his ruthless —and decisive— sophistication in managing the opposition itself: not simply keeping it under cabin pressure, but ensuring that anyone capable of genuinely challenging him is removed from the board entirely.

The principle is simple and it is brutal: no room for challenge. When a rival accumulates enough political capital to become a real threat, the judicial system — long since retrofitted as an instrument of political control — steps in.

Selahattin Demirtaş, the charismatic Kurdish politician who ran against Erdoğan in the 2018 presidential election and drew millions of votes from across the political spectrum, has been held in prison for nearly ten years. The European Court of Human Rights ruled his detention unlawful. ,Ankara ignored the ruling.

Ekrem İmamoğlu, the Istanbul mayor who had become the most popular opposition figure in the country — a man whose electoral victories in Turkey’s largest city sent genuine tremors through the ruling party — was arrested and has been held for over a year on charges that virtually no independent legal observer takes seriously.

The message to Turkish society is unmistakable: build a following large enough to matter, and the state will bury you in a courtroom — and jail.

But, raw incarceration, for all its brutality, is only one tool in a more elaborate architecture of control. Erdoğan’s deeper skill lies in dividing and paralysing what remains, engineering the opposition’s constituent parts into conflict with one another so that the field stays permanently fragmented.

The so-called “peace process” with imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan is the most cynical illustration of this method. Renewed overtures — carefully timed, deliberately vague, cunningly managed — have been dangled before the pro-Kurdish DEM Party as a once-in-a-generation opportunity.

The implicit offer conceals the “win-lose” equation in favour of the power: pull back from the broader democratic opposition segment, give the government the political room it needs, and improved conditions for Öcalan may eventually follow.

For a party whose base has endured decades of pressure, mass incarceration, and the removal of elected mayors by government decree, the temptation is genuine. But the consequence — by design or convenient accident — has been to peel DEM away from a unified opposition coalition at the precise moment that coalition was beginning to pose a credible threat.

The fiction that Öcalan’s fate holds the key to Turkish democratization has functioned not as a bridge toward freedom, but as a wedge driven through the only political force capable of challenging Erdoğan at the ballot box.

Meanwhile, the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) is being worked over through entirely different but equally deliberate means. A relentless cascade of arrests, fabricated trials, and judicial harassment targeting its elected officials has battered the party’s organizational spine.

Now the pressure is climbing toward its leadership. An appeals court ruling expected within weeks is widely anticipated to trigger a historic structural crisis inside the CHP — one that could unseat chairman Özgür Özel and his inner circle, stripping the party of its current leadership and plunging it into the kind of vicious, resource-draining internal conflict, and division, that renders it harmless for years.

Erdoğan, in that scenario, does not need to win elections through persuasion. He simply needs to ensure his opponents are too busy fighting each other to fight him. He knows, too, that his engineering has managed to widen the gap between the voter bases of the DEM and the CHP.

Turkey remains, remarkably, a formal EU candidate and a load-bearing pillar of NATO’s southeastern flank. The latter position grants Erdoğan exactly the strategic leverage he craves without imposing the accountability that genuine membership would demand. He is close enough to the Western institutional order to enjoy its protection, and far enough outside it to treat its values as optional.

The Orbán story ends with Brussels eventually setting the terms of restoration of its broken democratic order. The Turkish story — absent a seismic rupture in the international order or an improbable resurrection of Turkish civil society — offers no equivalent exit ramp.

Pretending otherwise is not optimism. It is the kind of willful blindness that authoritarian leaders count on. Realism may offer a dark picture, but it also encourages bolder democratic strategies for the opposition.

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From parliamentary arithmetic to judicial appointments, from municipal crackdowns to co-opting the Kurdish political movement, the picture that emerges is not one of isolated maneuvers, but of a coherent and deliberate architecture.

One critical aspect is that, while many pundits in Turkey for various reasons seem lost in the “forest” chasing trees, outside world is far too busy dealing with the growing global disorder, to pay attention to what is happening in this key regional player.

The world in such commotion is fertile ground for arbitrary moves. And Erdoğan sees a wide horizon to weaken the political opposition, and cement a “unity of powers” to advance further. He knows that he can.

The Parliamentary Numbers Game:

On January 7th, Erdoğan personally pinned party badges on three newly defected lawmakers in his AKP’s group meeting — all of them previously elected on opposition party tickets. The move pushed AKP’s parliamentary tally to 275 seats. Together with its nationalist coalition partner MHP, the ruling bloc now commands 322 seats in the 600-member Grand National Assembly.

Those numbers matter enormously. Under Turkish law, calling an early election requires 360 votes; passing a constitutional amendment that goes to a referendum requires the same threshold. Bypassing the referendum altogether requires 400 votes.

The coalition is still short of the “magic numbers” — 38 seats for early elections, 78 for a full constitutional overhaul — but the direction of travel is clear. It is no secret that both Erdoğan and Devlet Bahçeli — his devoted ally in power as the leader of the nationalist MHP— eye pro-Kurdish DEM Party, which has 56 seats along with nine “independent” deputies. Driving a wedge within the main opposition party, the CHP, with 138 seats, seems to be the part of that plan. (I will explain this game further below.)

Erdoğan himself signaled in January that constitutional work was ongoing, and his newly appointed Justice Minister made it explicit in late March: “We need a new constitution. This current one is simply too tight a fit.”

The Gürlek Appointment: Justice Ministry as a Political Weapon:

If there is a single appointment that crystallizes where Turkey is heading, it is the February 11th naming of Akın Gürlek as Justice Minister. Gürlek spent his career as a prosecutor presiding over some of the most politically charged cases in recent Turkish history, including the Gezi Park trial that put philanthropist and civil society activist Osman Kavala behind bars for life.

His elevation to the ministry is not merely a cabinet reshuffle — because in Turkey, the Justice Minister automatically becomes the chairman of the Supreme Board of Judges and Prosecutors (HSK), the body that appoints, reassigns, and disciplines all 25,000 judges and prosecutors in the country.

On March 19th, a sweeping reshuffle inside the ministry followed, with senior directors across criminal affairs, civil law, and prison administration being replaced in a single stroke, by a presidential decree.

These are the bureaucratic sinews of any major judicial operation. Days later, Gürlek sat beside Mehmet Uçum — the presidential legal affairs chief who has long been seen as one of the architects of a new constitution which is expected to bear the AKP signature — at a legal council meeting in Çankaya Palace. His message was unambiguous: the constitutional project is no longer on the back burner.

Then came the final piece: on March 27th, Erdoğan signed a decree appointing a Court of Cassation judge, Şaban Kazdal, to the Constitutional Court (AYM).

With this, Erdoğan has now personally appointed 14 of the 15 justices on Turkey’s highest court — the last institutional body that could theoretically check executive overreach. The Constitutional Court joins the HSK, the Supreme Court, the Council of State, and the Court of Accounts as institutions now effectively subordinate to the executive.

The CHP Municipal Crackdown: More Than Revenge?

Since the March 2024 local elections — in which the opposition CHP scored a historic nationwide victory — at least 20 CHP-affiliated mayors have been detained or arrested. The most recent additions include Bolu’s Tanju Özcan (arrested March 2nd), Uşak’s mayor Özkan Yalım (March 27th), and Bursa’s metropolitan mayor Mustafa Bozbey (March 31st).

Calling this a simple electoral vengeance by Erdoğan may miss its strategic logic. Strip an opposition party of its mayors, and you strip it of its funding base, its patronage networks, its visibility, and its organizational capacity heading into the next election cycle. On top of that, all of the local CHP politicians under arrest (about 300 of them) are charged with various forms of corruption and find themselves already in a barrage of condemnations as “rotten apples” by pro-government media.

There is also a legal sword dangling overhead: an ongoing lawsuit seeking the “absolute nullity” (actus nullus) of CHP’s 2023 party congresses, currently working its way through the appeals courts. Lately, strong rumours suggest that it is only a matter of time (weeks, rather than months) such a ruling will be issued by the appeals court.

Should that case succeed, it could trigger a major leadership crisis — stripping the current leader, Özgür Özel, off his titles, along with his close circle and lifting his immunity to face charges. It will potentially lead former party leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu back into the picture— causing a parliamentary split. (Kılıçdaroğlu is said to have about 50-60 loyal deputies within the CHP’s parliamentary group.

A fragmented opposition, in turn, would make it considerably easier for the ruling coalition to reach those critical thresholds for early elections or constitutional change.

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Centralizing Local Power: The Municipal Law Overhaul

This one seems synchronized with the new local government reform package, expected to pass in 2026, would tie municipal budgets to central government approval and introduce oversight commissions with representatives appointed by Ankara. In practice, this means that even an opposition mayor who survives prosecution would find their administrative authority severely curtailed.

An elected local government would effectively become an administrative outpost of the center — accountable upward, not downward. Erdoğan clearly aims to avoid new “cold showers” through local elections, as he remains keen on controlling all the greater municipalities, by subordinating them all to the “ultra-centralistic” power structure, he is constructing, in harmony with the “super-presidential” order dating back to 2017.

The Kurdish Flank: Neutralizing DEM Party Through a Hollow “Peace Process”

Since late 2024, the government has cultivated the appearance of a peace process with imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan, with the Kurdish-rooted DEM Party serving as the interlocutor.

In what seems like a carefully designed choreography, Devlet Bahçeli, Erdoğan’s “brother in arms” continues with his role as a “battering ram” — or as an encouraging force — to keep Öcalan/DEM camp hopeful, as Erdoğan stays in the background, apparently defining the time and the pace. The illusion of seeing Öcalan, as “freed” or declared officially as “chief negotiator” in the “process”, DEM has been drawn into a narrowed down focus, staying aloof to all punitive or oppressive moves by the power.

Eighteen months in, Ankara has made no concrete concessions, while DEM has been steadily drawn into a dynamic it can neither control nor easily exit. Walking away means abandoning the prospect of Öcalan’s release and risking the process being blamed on the party itself. Staying in means absorbing mounting conditions without reciprocal moves.

Either way, DEM’s capacity to function as a coherent opposition voice is being systematically eroded — neutralized not by force, but by entanglement. Surveys also show growing discontent of the grassroots on DEM, offering signs of eventual implosion.

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The Architecture of “Permanent Power”

Taken individually, each of these moves could be debated on its own terms. Taken together, they describe something more deliberate: the construction of a political system in which winning elections is at increasingly high risk, and no longer sufficient to change the direction of the country.

As skillful and strategic as ever— Erdoğan is simultaneously fracturing the Centrist/Kemalist opposition (the CHP) through prosecutions and nullification threats, taming the second largest segment of the political opposition (DEM Party) through a process weighted entirely on his terms, and building a judiciary that answers to the executive at every level, and enforces a shield for more advances in the direction of full-scale power grab.

This is not the consolidation of a short term political advantage. It is the further engineering of the rules of the game itself — and as of the end of March 2026, it is proceeding largely on schedule.

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The imagery was deliberately sacred, a secular reliquary. That incongruence — the sanctification of a man whose actual academic footprint in international scholarship was vanishingly small — points to a peculiar social phenomenon rather than a commemoration. Statements and articles display a remarkable level of mass ritual.

Clearly, we are facing a new case of mythification — the construction of a cult around his persona. But the record nevertheless needs to be set straight on who this remarkable, charismatic personality really was.

The hagiographies go so far as to describe Ortaylı as Turkey’s greatest historian, one of the most important scholars of the Ottoman world. But the numbers tell a different story. According to available data on Web of Science, Ortaylı’s indexed output amounts to three publications — two of them from 1982 and 1991, in Bulgarian Historical Review and Cahiers du Monde Russe — with only a handful of references.

His most-cited work across all platforms reaches approximately 839 citations, a figure modest for four decades of output and strikingly low when compared to mid-career Ottoman historians.

Ortaylı’s “academic period” ended in 1990’s. He produced since 2000 virtually nothing that the global academic community chose to engage with in a sustained, peer-reviewed way. His later output consists mainly of popular essays, and he continued publishing non-academic or domestically oriented works into the 2000s and 2010s.

He appeared on the state-broadcaster (not a “public broadcaster” by definition) TRT for decades, directed Topkapı Palace Museum from 2005 to 2012 .

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To understand the avalanche of grief, one must grasp what Ortaylı represented “functionally” to Turkish society rather than what he was “academically.” Ortaylı accumulated — to cite Bourdieu — enormous “symbolic capital”: the dismissive wit, the sharp tongue, the command of seven languages, a seemingly effortless know-it-all attitude, the Oxford and Cambridge visiting fellowships — all of which operated as oral performances of scholarly authority rather than as its substance.

In a country where genuine academic freedom has been catastrophically eroded — where thousands of academics were purged after the 2016 Peace Petition and the Emergency Rule the same year; where university appointments are politically mediated, and critical journalism is criminalized — Ortaylı filled the vacuum of the “safe genius.”

He was safe because his authority never truly threatened the state — and vice versa. He acted like a genius, in line with the Turkish tradition of gullible respect for what is locally called a “walking library” (“Ayaklı Kütüphane”) because the state needed one and the public needed to believe in one.

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I had known him for over three decades and was fascinated by his command of his charisma, his masterful use of charm. He loved to impress, always ready for soundbytes, but was far less interested to listen to the others, especially those who begged to differ. He loved conversations where he was the dominating force, and gossip; his elitist sarcasm never raised eyebrows, he surfed on popularity, enjoyed it massively. This made him basically a bon vivant, acting as a know-it all.

But his — should we say, tragic? — paradox was, that the more he chose the path as “mobile intellectual”, exclusively oral and opinionated on nearly all the issues one can think of, his journey fell into trap of shallowness, minimized often to one-liners; fed only by the arsenal of reputation he had built in his youth as a promising, brilliant scholar.

But the reactions to his death are less about who he was than about the society in which he flourished. It is about Turkey mourning its own suppressed intellectual life, displaced onto a figure who embodied the “form” of scholarship without its most discomforting functions.

In oppressive regimes, public intellectuals tend to bifurcate into two types: dissidents and legitimizers.

Ortaylı occupied the legitimizer role with unmatched comfort.

His directorship of Topkapı Palace during precisely the years when the AKP was constructing its neo-Ottoman symbolic architecture was not a coincidence of timing — it was a structural fit. The museum is not merely a cultural institution but a stage on which the state performs its historical self-image.

His decades-long presence on TRT, a broadcaster whose editorial independence is openly and severely compromised, signals the same alignment.

The Kurds’ plight regarding recognition of their native tongue and collective rights was, in his mind, to be disdained. His dismissal of the Kurdish political movement as “ahistorical” and his framing of 1915 as “wartime chaos” rather than a premeditated ethnic cleansing/genocide of Ottoman Armenians (the Sultan’s subjects) are not eccentric scholarly positions — they track the state’s official line with a precision that cannot be attributed to coincidence.

His aloofness toward the erosion of academic freedoms in Turkey also did not escape attention. As the ruling AKP and President Erdoğan deliberately, constantly narrowed the scope of academia and strangled its autonomy — the recent case being Boğaziçi University, once among the top universities in the world, being emblematic — Ortaylı chose to remain silent. That most of the independent Turkish scholars, at home and abroad, remained low key at his death is self-explanatory.

This is the portrait of the court intellectual: someone whose erudition lends legitimacy to power, while power lends a platform to erudition. The relationship is symbiotic, and its beneficiaries are rarely aware of — or honest about — its terms.

The mass ritual of mourning is a mass projection of several simultaneous fantasies.

First, the fantasy that Turkey is a country that produces world-class scholars — a fantasy that Ortaylı’s domestic celebrity sustained and his international invisibility contradicted.

Second, the fantasy of a cosmopolitan Ottoman heritage that is sophisticated, tolerant, and pluralist — exactly the version Ortaylı narrated, conveniently stripping out the structural subordination of non-Muslim communities and the organized violence at the empire’s end.

Third, and most poignantly, the fantasy of “critical thinking itself.” Ortaylı’s sarcasm, his impatience with intellectual dissent, and his professorial condescension were consumed as proxies for intellectual rigor by an audience that has been systematically denied the multiple facets of truth. He was not, in the true sense of the word, battling to shed light on the dark sides of historical phenomena; instead, in his later years, he endorsed a narrative that fed the denialism deeply buried in society. His comfort zone elevated him — to his content.

When authentic intellectual culture is oppressed — when academics are jailed or fired, when curricula are politically curated, when scholarly research on “taboo” areas is de facto banned, when dissent is criminalized — societies do not simply go without.

They project.

The univocal chorus of opinion leaders praises a figure who performs the gestures of intellectual life without its risks and then mourns him with the intensity reserved for things that have been, on some level, irrecoverably lost.

The working chamber in Levent, with its books, bust, and silence, was not being mourned as a scholar’s private space. It was being mourned as an idea of Turkey that could never fully exist and now, with his death, feels definitively foreclosed.

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He is not merely choosing between allies and adversaries. He is simultaneously managing five live wires, any one of which, if mishandled, could send him into a risk zone.

Yet, true to form, Erdoğan appears to be tiptoeing forward—and calculating that the “chaos”, whose management he is always in command of, may serve him more than it threatens him.

The first wire is the one he has most carefully defused. For years, the notorious Halkbank case cast a long juridical shadow over Erdoğan’s relationship with Washington. The state-owned Turkish bank had been charged in Manhattan Federal Court with participating in a multibillion-dollar scheme to help Iran evade U.S. sanctions through an elaborate oil-for-gold laundering network operating between 2011 and 2013—one that federal prosecutors directly tied to senior Turkish government officials and, by implication, to Erdoğan and his family circle.

The case survived Supreme Court appeals and seemed poised to become a permanent diplomatic sword of Damocles. Then, on March 9, 2026—barely days into the escalation—the U.S. Department of Justice quietly filed a deferred prosecution agreement: no financial penalties, no guilty plea from the institution, and charges to be dropped once a compliance monitor approves.

The timing was not coincidental. With Trump back in the White House and invested in Turkish cooperation—or at least Turkish non-obstruction—the Halkbank sword has been sheathed. Having seen how beneficial his “friendship” with Trump is, Erdoğan must have taken a deep breath.

That breath, however, does not translate into comfort. The second wire demands that Erdoğan walk with extraordinary care around Trump’s war. Turkey—a NATO member sharing a 534-kilometer border with Iran—cannot openly antagonize the impulsive and unpredictable president of the United States and jeopardize the most important—if not the only—unthreatening bind that ties his government to the Western system.

Erdoğan has reportedly been “frustrated” at failing to prevent the initial U.S. strikes, scrambling to contain the fallout. He has warned publicly of a “devastating war,” a “need for peace,” but these are calibrated words—loud enough to signal regional concern, soft enough not to constitute opposition.

The balancing act is deliberate: Ankara has no interest in being dragged into a direct confrontation with Tehran, but it has equally little interest in being cut off from the political capital that proximity to Trump’s inner circle now provides.

In Erdoğan’s assessment, the EU, in profound disarray and seemingly rudderless, doesn’t seem to count as much. He knows, by his recent talks with Ursula von der Leyen, that the major worry is just what he thinks: a potential threat to the EU of a massive refugee exodus from Iran.

This is well-known Erdoğan turf: he has learned how to manage the EU’s “endless concerns” to his own benefit. That Brussels nearly stopped whining about Turkey’s nearly 40,000 political prisoners and sham trials—such as the one targeting the mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem İmamoğlu—is seen by him as an extra bonus along his way.

But the issue of potential exodus from Iran, on the domestic stage, is a potential challenge.

The third wire cuts closest to Erdoğan’s electoral survival. Turkey already hosts some of the world’s largest refugee populations. The Syrian conflict, still unresolved properly, has not yet led to a mass remigration of Syrian refugees from Turkey. Estimates circulating in Ankara suggest that a full-scale conflict in Iran could push up to one million Iranians toward the Turkish border. Turkish officials have briefed parliament that such a scenario constitutes a “red line.”

The main opposition CHP—itself fighting for survival against government prosecution—has demanded emergency coordination between the Interior and Defense ministries to prevent a new migration wave. For Erdoğan, who needs to win another term—either through constitutional amendment or snap elections, both requiring Kurdish votes or opposition collapse—a fresh humanitarian crisis on the eastern border would hand his foes the one issue capable of uniting a fractured electorate against him.

The fourth wire is the most quietly combustible. Erdoğan has “publicly” banned trade with Israel since June 2024, positioning himself as the Muslim world’s most vocal defender of Palestinian rights. But Kpler ship-tracking data tells a different story: Israel’s imports of Azerbaijani crude oil via Turkey’s Ceyhan terminal—pumped through the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline—reached 94,000 barrels per day in 2025, a 31 percent year-on-year increase and a three-year high.

The trade flows invisibly through Turkish infrastructure because Ankara insists it does not control where Azerbaijani oil is sold. This legal fiction suits everyone: Baku maintains its energy revenues, Ankara preserves its role as a crucial transit state, and Israel keeps its tankers full. As oil prices spike on the back of the Iran war, Erdoğan’s incentive to maintain this triangular arrangement—and his strategic friendship with Aliyev’s Azerbaijan—needs extra care. He bashes Israel in front of the cameras and helps oil its refineries behind them.

The fifth wire is existential. Turkey’s Defense Ministry confirmed on March 4, 2026, that it is “closely following” the activities of PJAK, the Iranian Kurdish militant group affiliated with the PKK, warning that its actions “negatively affect not only Iran’s security but also the general peace and stability of the region.” The warning was aimed as much at Washington as at Tehran: reports had surfaced that Iranian Kurdish militias had consulted with U.S. officials about possible operations in western Iran.

Seasoned observers agree that, given the zigzags of Trump—almost on a daily basis—and the course of the war, this leaves open the door for an armed Kurdish engagement on Iranian ground.

For Erdoğan, this would be the nightmare scenario. He has spent years methodically dismantling Kurdish political agency—weakening Syrian Kurdish self-rule after the fall of Assad, pressuring unilaterally and successfully the PKK into a submission to his power by a disarmament process at home, managing the pro-Kurdish DEM Party to toe his line, and the popular Kurdish politician Selahattin Demirtaş —along with thousands of other Kurdish political prisoners— behind bars.

An Iran war that revitalizes the Iranian Kurdish armed movement, potentially with American backing, would unravel this painstakingly constructed architecture and lead Turkey’s Kurds to second thoughts. The one Kurdish political moment he cannot afford is a neighboring success story. In this, again, he invests his trust in Trump personally, having already experienced a visible success in Syria.

Viewed in isolation, each of these pressures looks potentially destabilizing. However, viewed together through Erdoğan’s prism, the balance sheet is considerably less alarming. The Halkbank resolution removes a legal weapon from the hands of any future U.S. administration inclined to use it. The covert oil triangle with Azerbaijan and Israel generates revenue and regional leverage without requiring a formal position. The Kurdish disarmament process at home gives him a tool to neutralize domestic Kurdish politics before the Iranian Kurds can reinspire them.

And the legal decapitation of the CHP—with İmamoğlu’s trial now launched, and the party’s congress itself under court challenge—leaves the secular opposition fighting for its institutional survival rather than electoral strategy.

But, one variable — the sixth challenge— that resists control is energy.

A sustained oil and gas shock—driven by a prolonged Iran war and cascading pipeline disruptions—could erode the Turkish economy faster than any court ruling can suppress dissent. Inflation that already bit hard in 2024 would bite harder still. And economic pain, historically, is the one force that has moved Turkish voters regardless of judicial engineering.

Erdoğan has navigated crises that would have ended lesser governments. His record suggests he may emerge also from this one not weakened, but consolidated—with the Kurds quieted, the opposition legally cornered, and his NATO credentials polished enough to preserve Washington’s goodwill.

The tightrope holds—unless the price at the pump says otherwise.

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This is the affection that erupted between Turkey and Spain the moment Pedro Sánchez looked into the camera and declared what much of the world was thinking: “No to war!”

When Spain’s prime minister refused to let the Rota and Morón bases be used for the US‑Israeli offensive against Iran — defying Trump’s threats to cut trade ties and calling the attacks a “dangerous adventure,” like “playing Russian roulette with millions of lives” — Europe murmured diplomatically. Turkey, meanwhile, exploded online.

What made the Turkish reaction remarkable was not its passion but its reach. It cut through Turkey’s normal fault lines, uniting three hostile tribes who share almost nothing but a passport — all briefly humming the same tune.

First came Erdoğan’s Islamist base: fiercely pro‑Palestinian, reflexively anti‑Israel, and thrilled to see a European socialist stand up to the Western powers they hold responsible for Muslim suffering. For once, Sánchez was not a leftist to distrust but a “righteous defender” — the sort of moral category that trumps ideology in political Islam.

Then came the Kemalist nationalists, the secular but anti‑Western “Turkey first” camp that has never forgiven NATO its superiority complex. They saw in Spain a sovereign state refusing vassalage, a mirror of their own resentment toward Washington.

And finally, Turkey’s anti‑imperialist left — small but noisy — spotted in Sánchez the ghost of Allende, the echo of every Global South leader who had dared to say no. (Preceding that a group of its “elite” — artists, writers, columnists — had issued a solidarity video, praising Cuba, asking for solidarity.)

Thus, three utterly incompatible camps — Islamists, ultra‑secularists, Marxists — aligned, however fleetingly, in admiration for a Spanish prime minister. What united them was simple: hostility toward US hegemony and Israel.

What followed was an irresistible carnival of Turkish‑Spanish cross‑pollination. Offers of “free hair transplants for all brave Spaniards” went viral, alongside AI images of Guardiola and Iniesta sporting glossy new manes — the most Turkish act of solidarity imaginable. Eskişehirspor fans revived their improbable love of “Paquito el Chocolatero,” the Valencian brass‑band anthem long adopted by Turkish terraces. Flamenco‑saz mashups and improbable kebab‑paella hybrids flooded TikTok. Some enthusiasts even demanded a Spanish visa fast‑track, history’s most whimsical form of digital diplomacy.

But, as always in Turkey, irony and polarisation arrived quickly. Kurdish users — politically astute and painfully aware of hypocrisies — reminded their compatriots what they were celebrating.

How could so many, they asked, who silence Kurdish language, jail Kurdish politicians, and deny communal rights, gush over a socialist government that has spent decades experimenting with real regional autonomy? Spain’s “Estado de las Autonomías” — that devolution of power Madrid critics once derided — represented precisely what Turkey’s state had always suppressed.

Their intervention wasn’t just a buzzkill; it was an X‑ray. It revealed that Turkey’s love for Sánchez was less about solidarity than projection: a yearning for dignity reflected onto another country’s defiance.

Because Turkey, at its core, is a nation trapped between humiliation and pride. Mocked by Brussels, bullied by Washington, excluded from the EU that never quite said yes and never definitively said no — it craves acknowledgment of its sovereignty. Sánchez, standing before the world and telling a superpower “no”, embodied that fantasy.

Spain, historically on NATO’s periphery, proudly independent‑minded, and just Mediterranean enough to feel familiar, became Turkey’s ideal mirror: the Western country that says what Turks wish their own leaders could say without cost.

Back in Madrid, the mood was more amused than ecstatic. Spaniards did not wake up on that March morning thinking about Turkey. Discovering that millions across the Bosphorus had anointed them moral heroes was, at best, a curious compliment. The asymmetry was telling: Turkey overwhelmed and earnest; Spain politely flattered.

In the end, this curious episode said less about Sánchez than about Turkey’s collective psyche — perpetually seeking external confirmation of its worth. The fleeting digital romance between Ankara and Madrid was never about Spain’s foreign policy so much as Turkey’s emotional geopolitics: an affair conducted entirely in memes, projections, and longing.

Geopolitical desire, like personal desire, is rarely mutual, almost never measured, and always revealing of the one who feels it most.

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The Turkish word carries weight: it means burnt out, depleted, used up. Among the young, the unemployed, and women, the scores climbed even higher. Nearly half of respondents said they needed psychological support in the past year. More telling still, the desire to leave the country has shifted from marginal fantasy to “mainstream option” among the young.

A second survey, Veri Enstitüsü’s January “Veri Pusulası” (“Data Compass”) study on laughter and humor, deepened the portrait: 46% of society reported being more unhappy than two years ago, an increase visible even among high-income groups. The sources of happiness remain stubbornly basic—health, family, financial security—revealing a society no longer dreaming of better lives but clinging desperately to what it hasn’t yet lost. The motto of survival has become: “stay afloat by desiring less.”

This is not the Turkey of street protests and civic defiance. This is a society that has learned the cost of resistance and chosen, for now, a different posture: endurance without hope, a quiet desperation.

The Veri Pusulası findings reveal a cruel paradox: 82% of Turks view laughter as a necessity, yet 70% believe humor has been squeezed into a narrower, more cautious space than before. The need to laugh grows even as the courage to laugh shrinks. Humor has transformed from light entertainment into a coping mechanism, a brief oxygen mask in an airless room.

What can and cannot be joked about maps precisely onto Turkey’s power structures. Seventy-nine percent say “not everything can be joked about,” with religious values topping the forbidden list at 58%, followed by disability (55%), child abuse (53%), and identity-based topics (52%).

Religious humor especially is coded not as entertainment but as “disrespect” and “provocation”—a boundary violation rather than a boundary to be negotiated.

Even the physical act of laughing carries gendered surveillance. Half of Turkish society believes women should be “controlled” when laughing in public, a norm that strengthens with age and conservatism and weakens with education. For women, laughter becomes not an emotional expression but a behavior constrained by moral and class codes.

Masculinity norms operate similarly: the vulgar phrase “don’t laugh like a woman” still resonates, particularly among less educated and traditional groups, suggesting that even a man’s laughter must pass through a filter of acceptable masculinity.

The consumption patterns reflect this compression: humor now flows through Instagram (64%), YouTube (53%), and television (63%)—short, fast, algorithm-driven formats. The preferred criterion is “clever humor” (86%), but the overall picture suggests laughter has become fragmented, privatized, and cautious.

Into this atmosphere of quiet desperation and calibrated mirth came an unexpected figure: Tarkan, the “Prince of Pop,” returned to Istanbul stages after seven years away. Living in Germany, largely apolitical, the 52-year-old megastar had become something of a ghost in his own country’s cultural memory.

When tickets for his January concerts at Volkswagen Arena went on sale, the first four shows sold out in 45 minutes. By the time the series concluded in early February—ten nights in total—the emotional register had shifted from entertainment to something closer to collective therapy.

“If you ask me, I feel a bit empty,” Tarkan confessed in a video message after the final show. “The concerts were so amazing that I am still under their influence and yours. I already miss you”.

But the mourning was mutual. Social media filled with testimonials that read less like concert reviews than gratitude letters to a rescuer. “How happy you have made us,” fans repeated, as if joy itself had become a scarce commodity requiring acknowledgment.

The concerts were a commercial triumph for Tarkan, of course. But their cultural meaning exceeded their entertainment value. In a country where 46% report increased unhappiness, where laughter requires caution, and where political assembly carries risk, a pop star’s return became a sanctioned gathering place for relief—a rare moment when Turkey’s urban, secular middle class could experience collective joy without fear of misunderstanding or reprisal.

But, while Tarkan’s audiences found brief respite, the state machinery of cultural division continued its work. On February 9, Istanbul authorities canceled concerts by two extreme metal bands, Slaughter to Prevail and Behemoth, citing concerns about “satanism” and threats to public morality. The Russian and Polish acts, both internationally successful, had been targeted by Akit TV, a pro-government Islamist broadcaster whose host warned they would “steal the faith of young people”.

The band members protested in vain. Alex Terrible of Slaughter to Prevail posted online that he is not satanic but pagan, destined for Valhalla, while his Orthodox Christian guitarist “will probably go to hell”.

The clarification missed the point. These were not theological debates but cultural border patrols, enforcement of those boundaries around religion that 58% of Turks consider off-limits to humor or transgression.

The Zorlu Performance Arts Center, one of Istanbul’s premier venues, faced a blanket two-day ban. The message was clear: certain forms of expression remain forbidden, certain audiences unwelcome.

Then, in mid-February, came perhaps the most deliberately inflammatory episode: a TV series that seemed designed to test the limits of Turkey’s social faultlines. “Aynı Yağmur Altında” (“Under the Same Rain”), a new drama on ATV, aired a scene in its second episode where a Christian character serves pork to a conservative Muslim family at dinner.

The reaction was immediate and furious. Social media erupted with accusations that the scene was “provoking” and intended to deepen polarization. Even secular commentators noted the absurdity: in Turkish culture, Christian or Muslim, pork simply — perhaps with a few exceptions — doesn’t appear at dinner tables.

But that, perhaps, was precisely the point. The scene was not documentary realism but culture-war programming—content designed to activate tribal identities, to force viewers into choosing sides, to maintain the polarized grid through which Turkish society now experiences itself. In a country where humor and laughter are already constrained by fear of violating religious sensitivities, a fictional pork dinner becomes a weapon of social fragmentation.

It did not stop there. A row erupted as Turkey’s Education Ministry issued circulars mandating Ramadan-themed activities in public schools, including mosque visits and religiously framed events that critics say effectively pressure pupils into Islamic practices under the guise of “voluntary” cultural programming.

Meanwhile, 168 prominent intellectuals and artists signed a “We Defend Secularism Together” manifesto warning of a “reactionary‑sharia siege”, accusing the government of using education to dismantle Turkey’s secular order, a text that has since become the target of criminal complaints by Education Minister Yusuf Tekin.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has publicly denounced the signatories as a clique of “bigots” hostile to the nation’s “national and spiritual values,” insisting that Ramadan activities are both constitutional and compatible with secularism, even as unions and opposition figures argue that turning state schools into sites of organized worship violates the constitutional principle of neutrality toward all beliefs.

In short, Kulturkampf in full scale action.

What unites these fragments—the burnout and unhappiness surveys, the paradox of needing but fearing laughter, the Tarkan euphoria, the banned concerts, the inflammatory TV drama—is a portrait of a country under a specific kind of oppression. Unlike Georgia’s recent protests or Serbia’s and Romania’s anti-corruption movements, Turkey’s opposition remains atomized, exhausted, afraid; its urban middle classes resorting to a sort of “discontented conformism”.

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What remains is this: private exhaustion, shrinking expectations, brief cultural escapes through a pop star’s nostalgia tour, and a ruling strategy that relentlessly advances polarization as a governance tool. People still seek health, family, and basic security—not grand dreams but simply not losing what little they have. A pop star becomes a lifeline because almost everything else has been taken away, including the freedom to laugh without fear.

The Veri Pusulası findings suggest that emotional fatigue has altered the very repertoire of responses available to citizens. Unlike Georgia’s recent protests or Serbia’s and Romania’s anti-corruption movements, Turkey’s opposition remains atomized, exhausted, afraid or infected with conformism. The post-Gezi, post-coup generation has learned that streets are not neutral spaces but killing grounds for futures. Instead of anger, fear, or rebellion, people respond by laughing at their situation—”laughing at the state we should be crying about,” as the Turkish expression goes. This is not the laughter of joy but of exhaustion wearing the mask of bitter humor.

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Yet amid the packed schedules and high-level bilaterals, one conspicuous absence stood out. Turkey, a NATO member since 1952, a nation commanding strategic geography at the crossroads of three continents, sent neither its president nor its foreign minister.

The country that once positioned itself as an indispensable bridge between East and West was represented only by Mehmet Şimşek, its economy minister.

Even that token presence proved fleeting. Şimşek was scheduled to appear on a panel discussing Syria’s future—a conflict in which Turkey has been deeply involved for over a decade, hosting millions of refugees and maintaining military operations across the border. A short time before the session, he withdrew.

The reason? The invitation of two Syrian Kurdish leaders, Mazloum Abdi and Ilham Ahmed, to the conference. Rather than engaging in substantive debate about Syria’s reconstruction, refugee returns, or regional security, Turkey chose invisibility over dialogue.

Ilham Ahmed, co-chair of the Syrian Democratic Council (SDC), said: “Turkey has not officially accepted the agreement signed on January 29 between Damascus and the SDF,” adding: “I don’t think they viewed our participation in the Munich Security Conference favorably.”

How Strategic Blindness Masquerades as Splendid Isolation

This episode crystallizes a larger pattern: as the world convenes summits to debate the contours of a new global order—from Washington to Brussels, from Beijing to Brasilia—Turkey has become a phantom at the feast of great power politics. It does not engage in the debates on major issues, such as geopolitics, environment, trade.

This self-alienation is remarkable and has consequences. In cynical words circulating in diplomatic circles: it has chosen to be not at the table, but on the menu.

Its leadership speaks grandiously of becoming a “global power,” of “precious solitude” (“değerli yalnızlık”) as if isolation were a badge of honor rather than a symptom of diplomatic failure.

But this rhetorical swagger conceals a deeper malady: strategic blindness coupled with a wobbly foreign policy that has rendered Turkey unpredictable —thus unreliable—precisely when the international system is being remade.

This is not Turkey’s first rendezvous with historic failure. It promises to be the third catastrophic error of grand strategic proportions in three decades—each one compounding the last, each one narrowing Turkey’s room for manoeuver, each one transforming what should be geopolitical assets into liabilities.

The First Error: Democracy Denied at the Cold War’s End

The collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 represented not merely the end of Soviet communism but a fundamental reordering of European security. Western allies across the continent seized this moment to transform themselves. Italy dismantled its Gladio networks. Greece accelerated towards a EU membership.. Spain and Portugal had already transitioned to vibrant democracies. Most dramatically, former Warsaw Pact nations—Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, the Baltic states—embraced democratic governance and joined the European family.

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Turkey, however, chose a different path. In the early 1990s, even as its NATO allies were dismantling deep state structures, Turkey’s military establishment kept its tutelary grip tightened. It fiercely resisted advice from the allies to rise to the occasion and launch democratic transformation.

Rather than seizing the post-Cold War moment to democratize and reform, the Turkish Armed Forces blocked elected governments from implementing meaningful democratic changes, and tackle the Kurdish issue to stop the violence. Somo civilian leaders, fearful of retaliatons, toed the line.

The February 28, 1997 “post-modern coup” epitomized this reactionary instinct—using tanks, National Security Council memoranda, and judicial persecution to overthrow a democratically elected government without formally seizing power.

While Central and Eastern European nations were rewriting constitutions, establishing civilian control over militaries, and preparing for EU membership, Turkey’s generals were preserving their Cold War prerogatives.

The country that should have led the democratization of Eurasia instead became democracy’s laggard, clinging to an obsolete paradigm of national security (mainly due to its decades long oppression over the Kurdish demands for recognition) that conflated political pluralism with existential threat. This “four star obstinacy” was the main reason to give birth to victory of the AKP and the Islamists.

The Second Error: The Squandered European Dream

If the 1990s represented a missed opportunity, the 2000s began with promise. Turkey’s EU candidacy, officially confirmed in 1999 and negotiations launched in 2005, seemed to offer a roadmap out of the democratic deficit. The early Justice and Development Party (AKP) government under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan initially embraced the reform agenda—constitutional amendments, civilian oversight of the military, cultural rights reforms.

Then came the reversal. Using the obstructive policies of Sarkozy’s France and hesitations of Merkel’s Germany about the Turkish accesssion, Erdoğan chose to sharply deviate, mainly by undoing the key reforms, amending the Public Procurement Law and attacking the freedoms of expression and the media, as he purged the reformist flank from within his party.

The Gezi Park protests of 2013 marked the turning point. What began as an environmental demonstration, turning into a cultural uprising became a referendum on Erdoğan’s increasingly authoritarian style. His response—violent suppression, conspiracy theories about foreign plots, wholesale dismissal of legitimate grievances—revealed the hollowness of his democratic rhetoric.

The past decade has witnessed Turkey’s transformation into an authoritarian regime: purges following the 2016 coup attempt, imprisonment of journalists and academics, weaponization of the judiciary, constitutional changes concentrating power in a presidential system without checks or balances.

The EU accession process, once Turkey’s anchor to democratic norms, lies in ruins—not because of European intransigence but because of deliberate choices in Ankara.

Turkey has unilaterally abandoned the Copenhagen criteria, the very benchmarks it once pledged to meet. The country that could have become a democratic bridge between Europe and the Middle East instead became neither—too authoritarian for Europe, too unstable for effective regional leadership.

It is now at the top of the league of European states that has the highest number of political prisoners — at least 40 thousand of them, according to a deputy of pro-Kurdish DEM Party and a human rights monitor, Ömer Faruk Gergerlioğlu.

The Third Error: Irrelevance in the Making of a New Order

Which brings us back to Munich and the present moment. As great powers recalibrate after Ukraine, as new alignments form around technology, climate, and economic security, Turkey finds itself outside the room where decisions are made. The Munich episode is merely the latest symptom of a deeper dysfunction.

Turkey’s foreign policy has devolved into tactical opportunism without strategic coherence: buying Russian S-400 missiles while remaining in NATO, intervening in Libya and Syria without clear end goals, alternating between provocations and reconciliation attempts with neighbors, pursuing transactional relationships devoid of trust or predictability.

The very fact that Turkey’s government could not bring itself to sit at a table with Syrian Kurdish representatives speaks volumes. Here was an opportunity to demonstrate diplomatic maturity, to engage seriously with actors who control territory adjacent to Turkey’s border, to shape conversations about Syria’s future.

Instead, Ankara chose to retreat, to absent itself from consequential debates because of who else might be in the room. This is not the behavior of a confident regional power. It is the posture of a state trapped by its own ideological rigidities and security obsessions.

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The rhetoric of “precious solitude” attempts to reframe diplomatic isolation as principled independence. But there is nothing precious about irrelevance. It reflects more of a “wait and see” attitude — a peculiar form of diplomatic fatalism.

Turkey’s economy teeters on the edge of crisis. Its democratic backsliding excludes it from Western councils. Its reliability as an ally is questioned in Washington, Brussels, and regional capitals alike. Now, as the architecture of the 21st century international system is being designed, Turkey chooses its seat at the drafting table, relying solely on the “good personal relations” between Erdoğan and Trump.

Three decades, three historic failures, each building upon the last. A country that began the post-Cold War era with enormous potential—a young population, strategic geography, NATO membership, EU candidacy, cultural and historical ties spanning continents—has systematically squandered its advantages through strategic myopia and authoritarianism, and clings to its staunch culture of patriarchalism.

The question that now haunts Turkey’s future is as bold as before: Will this nation shake off its self-imposed shackles? Can it rediscover the courage to democratize, the wisdom to pursue principled rather than transactional foreign policy, the humility to recognize that “precious solitude” is simply isolation by another name?

Or will historians record the early 21st century as the period when Turkey chose irrelevance, trading the promise of democratic leadership for the sole illusion of autocratic strength — surrounded by the slogans on the “great, golden past”.

But as Mark Carney, PM of Canada, made it clear: “Nostalgia is not a strategy”.

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* SDF commander Mazloum Abdi and Rojava’s de-facto "foreign minister” Ilham Ahmed were to join the Munich Security Conference, and held talks, among others, with US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio.
* There were reports that the U.S.A plans to gradually leave its military posts in Syria, hand the territorial control over to Damascus
* Turkey’s Foreign Minister, Hakan Fidan, mentioned Iraq as “next” after what was seen as “strategic gains” in Syria
* As part of the developments, and despite the critique and divisions of opinion, Turkey’s pro-Kurdish DEM Party seems intent on advancing the so-called “Terror-Free Turkey” project in synch with Ankara’s plans.

An enlightening series of viewpoints, from Ms Adar, as above.

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The appointment of Istanbul Chief Prosecutor Akın Gürlek as Justice Minister isn’t merely a cabinet reshuffle — it’s the installation of a judicial enforcer whose career has been defined by prosecuting dissidents, opposition leaders, and civil society figures.

Totalitarian Consolidation and Constitutional Endgame

With this single decision, Turkey consolidates a hyper-centralized, ruthlessly securitized regime, removing remaining barriers between what exists now and a form of quasi-totalitarian rule, under which the opposition continues to exist as either entities of coalescence or impotent political groups used for window dressing. The appointment therefore marks a brazen escalation in Erdoğan’s quest for unchallenged power.

Gürlek’s résumé leaves no room for ambiguity. As presiding judge at Istanbul’s 26th Heavy Penal Court, he sentenced former HDP co-chair Selahattin Demirtaş to nearly five years for a speech at the 2013 Istanbul Newroz celebrations, convicting him of “terrorist propaganda.”

He handed similar sentences to the late Kurdish politician Sırrı Süreyya Önder (formerly a member of the DEM delegation which visited İmralı Island, where Öcalan is jailed) and to leftist lawyer Selçuk Kozağaçlı, whose 11-year conviction alongside 19 other lawyers from the progressive ÇHD (“Contemporary Lawyers Association”) epitomized Gürlek’s role in criminalizing legal advocacy itself.

Later cases reinforced the pattern: CHP Istanbul chair Canan Kaftancıoğlu received over nine years for social media posts, while Turkish Medical Association (TTB) president Şebnem Korur Fincancı was sentenced to 2.5 years.

Elevated to Istanbul Chief Prosecutor in 2024, Gürlek spearheaded the sweeping probe into Istanbul Municipality, leading to İmamoğlu’s March 2025 arrest on corruption charges critics deem fabricated to neuter a formidable rival. His office indicted İmamoğlu on over 140 counts, potentially warranting millennia in prison, while targeting hundreds of CHP officials amid the party’s 2024 local election triumphs.

As a result, CHP head Özgür Özel faces probes, with his immunity at stake, while jailed mayor İmamoğlu endures what is widely believed to be a farce trial, fracturing the party’s momentum ahead of the 2028 polls. Gürlek’s elevation ensures that prosecutions multiply — from corruption charges to “terror links” — paralyzing CHP’s organization.

His trajectory therefore embodies Erdoğan’s “lawfare playbook”: cementing a judiciary tailored to shield the regime and dismantle its foes.

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Mind you, Gürlek’s appointment isn’t about a snap election — Erdoğan has no intention of calling polls before late 2027 at the earliest. Rather, it’s about methodically paving the electoral landscape, ensuring no judicial “cracks” appear that might create legal precedents favoring the opposition.

As journalist Alican Uludağ notes, the appointments signal preparation for 2028 and a new constitution that will not only protect Erdoğan’s seat but constitutionally entrench his political ideology and secure a regime structure.

Thus, the most important aspect of it all:

Now, as Justice Minister, Gürlek automatically becomes president of the Council of Judges and Prosecutors (HSK), granting him sweeping authority over appointments, promotions, relocations, and disciplinary actions for every judge and prosecutor in Turkey. This isn’t a reward for past service — it’s the installation of a gatekeeper to ensure judicial compliance with the regime’s imperatives.

The Dual Strategy: Crushing CHP, Baiting DEM

Historical parallels haunt this moment. A common thread in the past century’s dark regimes was that autocrats who left nothing to chance enjoyed longer political lives.

Against that background, Erdoğan’s move comes paired with a sophisticated “dual grip strategy” targeting Turkey’s fractured opposition.

On one front, the secular Republican People’s Party (CHP) faces relentless legal assault. Following the party’s stunning victories in the March 2024 local elections, the government has arrested mayors, launched corruption probes, and even attempted to annul the CHP’s 2023 leadership congress.

So, no surprise: CHP leader Özgür Özel’s immediate reaction to Gürlek’s appointment — “our job just got much harder” — signals the party’s recognition that a “Category 5 legal hurricane” is bearing down.

On the opposing front, a seductive ploy is deployed toward the pro-Kurdish DEM Party: Erdoğan and his ultra-nationalist ally Devlet Bahçeli dangle the prospect of Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan’s freedom before the party.

As a result — apparently on the “wishes” of Öcalan, which are perceived as directives — DEM cooperates with the government’s “Terror-Free Turkey” framework, accepts only rhetorical concessions, and gives up on its traditional demands for collective rights. It is told to expect few counter-gestures but to cooperate with the power bloc on constitutional amendments that will aim to secure the continuity of the hard-core regime — and the party may eventually see Öcalan released or his conditions eased.

Erdoğan himself declared on January 11 that “this term, the new constitution work will be completed,” revealing that a working group in his party is already preparing a draft — namely, one designed to ensure that he can run for the presidency once more without legal hassles. For this, the ruling bloc badly needs the support of the 57-seat DEM group.

Irony in a chaotic day: DEM’s “İmralı delegation” met with Erdoğan the same day Gürlek took his oath — a choreographed contrast to the massive brawl between CHP and ruling party MPs that erupted on the parliament floor just hours earlier.

The symbolism was stark: CHP members nursing bruises from fistfights while DEM representatives smiled beside Erdoğan in photo ops, as though Parliament operated at “Swiss-level civility.”

The two largest opposition parties, once potential allies that conveyed hope, now follow diverging paths — CHP facing existential legal warfare, DEM ensnared in a regime-controlled “peace process” that risks transforming them into a loyalist fig leaf.

This judicial hammer on CHP, velvet glove to DEM — exploits fissures. Amid a deepening economic crisis that leaves the poor masses with a weakening purchasing power, CHP’s secular base recoils at Kurdish concessions, while DEM is bound to battle to keep its increasingly confused and — because of the retreat of the Kurds in Syria — angered grassroots.

Erdoğan’s MHP allies amplify the rhetoric: demonize CHP as “rotten to the core,” bait DEM with a “Kurdish opening” mirage. Result? The opposition fragments, echoing Azerbaijan’s managed pluralism — or Central Asian models.

Erdoğan has — once more — time on his side: a staunch alliance with Trump based on mutual admiration, tepid EU responses prioritizing defense cooperation, and global democratic backsliding create permissive conditions for domestic crackdowns. He knows there will be no stumbling blocks on his path.

No ally of Turkey apparently cares that the country has the record in western alliance in terms of holding political prisoners.

According to a DEM MP, Ömer Faruk Gergerlioğlu, a politician keenly monitoring human rights breaches, there are “at least 40 thousand of them in Turkish prisons” — mayors of the CHP, Kurdish politicians such as Selahattin Demirtaş, civil society activists such as Osman Kavala or Çiğdem Mater, Gülenist publishers such as Hidayet Karaca, leftist lawyers such as Selçuk Kozağaçlı… journalists and many more.

Another Rubicon has been crossed. What unfolds next is grimly predictable: Turkey edges toward a totalitarian order where justice serves power, opposition withers under lawfare, and continuity trumps democracy.

There is only one caveat left: Turkish society, however polarised and tarnished it may be, has a far too complex DNA to be recreated in its ruler’s image.

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In this specific case, the Kremlin’s “Chechenization” strategy aimed to suppress separatist violence and the social demands producing it by concentrating the local security apparatus and political sphere under a single “loyalty partner”.

Uwe Halbach’s comprehensive analysis of Chechnya described this arrangement as resting more on a personal contract between the Kremlin and Grozny—“loyalty in exchange for broad internal authority and security autonomy”—than on federal-institutional compromise. His study depicted a system that effectively reduced Chechnya to a “private/personal state” operating through legal-administrative exceptions, while producing absolute allegiance to the center.

This personalized political alliance exposed fundamental vulnerabilities in Russia’s federal system. Kadyrov implemented an unofficial legal system rooted in religious and traditional codes, eroding the supremacy of federal law. His personal militia, the Kadyrovtsy, operates with near-total independence, undermining the Russian state’s monopoly on force. The arrangement represents what scholars have called a “horizontal power vertical”—a personal symbiosis between local leader and federal center tailor-made for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s system of personalized power.

The Syrian parallel emerges through Ahmed al-Sharaa’s positioning as the international community’s preferred interlocutor for post-Assad Syria. The former Al-Qaeda affiliate and leader of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) has strategically been presented as a moderate, delegating civilian administration to the Syrian Salvation Government (SSG) while maintaining paramount authority.

Much like Kadyrov’s transformation from Chechen separatist sympathizer to Putin’s “foot soldier,” al-Sharaa —who was “ripened” under the auspices of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan— has rebranded from jihadist commander to state-builder.

U.S. Special Envoy Thomas Barrack’s engagement with Damascus in January 2026, emphasizing dialogue and counter-terrorism cooperation, offers clear proof of Western acceptance of al-Sharaa’s centralized authority.

The key difference is that this acceptance stemmed from a personal agreement between Erdoğan and Trump, through which the former seems to have “persuaded” the latter. Ultimately, this mirrors the logic that produced Kadyrov: the search for a “functional interlocutor” who can impose order on the ground, even at the cost of institutional inclusiveness and constitutional guarantees.

The March 2025 agreement integrating the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) into state institutions illustrates the security-first approach. While al-Sharaa’s January 2026 decree granted citizenship and language rights to Syrian Kurds, the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria had for long rejected it as insufficient, stating that “rights are not safeguarded through temporary decrees, but are protected and entrenched through permanent constitutions”.

On January 30, both sides — “Al-Shaara administration”, the offshoot of the HTS, and the Kurdish-led SDF, reached an agreement, in which the crucial “constitution” component regarding minority rights was chopped off and thrown aside.

This echoes concerns that Syrian Kurdish demands are being pushed to a vulnerable ground, rather than anchored in permanent, fundamental guarantees.

Both models share crucial similarities.

First, they prioritize security integration over constitutional rights, following a “first pacify, then (perhaps) normalize” sequence.

Second, they personalize negotiation channels through single figures rather than institutional representation.

Third, they transform collective demands for autonomy, constitutional status, and cultural guarantees into manageable security contracts.

Fourth, both arrangements rest on external power calculations: Putin’s need to stabilize Chechnya after devastating wars parallels the U.S.-Turkish-European convergence on wanting a controllable post-Assad Syria, where a) the arguments of SDF in terms of containing the ISIS threat are nullified by moving the jihadist prisoners away from Syrian territory to Iraq, b) the hopes of European governments to be able to deport Syrian refugees back to their homeland, and c) Ankara operates as a “remote controller” of suppressing the Kurdish demands of constitutional autonomy and wide-scale collective rights.

Yet critical differences exist. Kadyrov emerged from within the Chechen nationalist movement—his father Akhmad switched sides during the Second Chechen War—giving him organic local legitimacy.

Al-Sharaa, by contrast, represents an Islamist military force — composed of Jihadists from Syria and various countries such as Uzbekistan, Chechnya etc— imposing authority on Syria’s multi-ethnic, multi-sectarian landscape. Chechnya’s relative ethnic homogeneity contrasts with Syria’s complex demographic mosaic, where Kurds, Arabs, Alawites, and others compete for representation.

Geographically, Chechnya constitutes a single federal subject within Russia’s recognized borders, while Syria’s territorial fragmentation and ongoing Turkish military presence create fundamentally different dynamics.

The international dimension also differs: Kadyrov operates within Russia’s sovereign framework with Putin’s backing, while al-Sharaa navigates competing U.S., Turkish, and European interests in a still-fragile transition.

Turkey’s own Kurdish question adds a third dimension to this model. The 2013-2015 peace process centered negotiations on Abdullah Öcalan as the singular interlocutor, with the state conducting closed negotiations through him and framing the ceasefire-disarmament agenda around his public calls. The 2024-2025 “Terror-Free Turkey” discourse similarly positions Öcalan’s potential call for disarmament as the process’s “key moment,” revealing the persistent preference for leader-centered channels.

This produces what can arguably be called a “double Kadyrov experiment”: al-Sharaa in Syria, Öcalan in Turkey. Both cases illustrate how central states reduce the “Kurdish question” from a rights-and-citizenship agenda to a disarmament-security axis mediated through singular intermediaries.

The Chechen model is not an “ethnic solution” but a method for central states to translate peripheral collective demands—constitutional status, self-governance, linguistic-cultural guarantees—into personalized intermediaries and security contracts rather than institutionalizing them.

Reading the excessive focus on Öcalan in Turkey and al-Sharaa in Syria through this lens reveals the risk of entirely removing these issues from rights-based negotiation frameworks.

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