Erdoğan Didn’t Invent Turkish Authoritarianism. He Inherited It.

Last month, a Turkish court issued a ruling that overturned the results of an internal leadership election in the country’s main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP). With their decision, the judges ousted the CHP‘s up-and-coming chairman Özgür Özel and replaced him with his predecessor, the notoriously uncharismatic Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu. It was a brazen act of political meddling that the party immediately dubbed “a judicial coup.”

It was not, however, an isolated event. For well over a year, Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu — President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s most formidable political rival and the CHP’s chosen presidential candidate — has sat in a high-security prison on corruption charges that his supporters insist are politically motivated. Last year, just days before he announced his own presidential candidacy, his 1994 university degree was annulled, making him legally ineligible to run. He has since collected fresh prison sentences for allegedly “insulting” a prosecutor. More than 500 people connected to CHP-run municipalities have also been detained. And now, the party’s leadership itself has been reengineered by judicial decree — its election overturned, its offices stormed by police firing tear gas.

A ruling party that controls the executive, the legislature, and much of the media is now systematically redesigning the opposition, making it less coherent, less threatening, and less capable of mounting a credible challenge in the ballots.

Meanwhile, the government, as always, denied any political interference: The judiciary, it insists, is independent. Yet few people in Turkey are persuaded by that denial. Many incline to a different conclusion: A ruling party that controls the executive, the legislature, and much of the media is now systematically redesigning the opposition, making it less coherent, less threatening, and less capable of mounting a credible challenge in the ballots.

What few observers seem to remember, however, is that this pattern of authoritarian overreach has deep roots in Turkish history.

Same Weapons, Different Users

I am old enough to remember the “Old Turkey” of the 1990s, when the roles were radically reversed: At that time, especially during the “post-modern coup” of 1997 and its aftermath, it was secularist judges who closed down pro-Islamic (or pro-Kurdish) parties, banned politicians from office, and used the courts as instruments of political engineering. Two of the predecessors of Erdoğan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) were shut down by Turkey’s Constitutional Court. In 1998, Erdoğan’s own political career nearly ended with a conviction for inciting religious hatred — thanks to his public recitation of a poem. As late as 2008, judges nearly dissolved the AKP itself, failing to do so only because of political pressure from the European Union, which Turkey was then angling to join.

In fact, the secularists’ authoritarian tactics went back to the very beginning of the Republic. In 1925, its founding president Mustafa Kemal Atatürk outlawed the main opposition party and established a one-party state. Lasting well beyond his death in 1938, this full-blown Kemalist autocracy ended only in 1945. Atatürk also set up special courts — the so-called Independence Tribunals — to execute or exile his dissidents. And in open defiance of the separation of powers, that pillar of political liberalism since Montesquieu, he championed what he called “the unity of powers.” It meant that all three branches of government — executive, legislative, and judicial — would be united under the “national will,” which was represented by none other than Atatürk himself.

Moreover, Atatürk’s devoted followers, the Kemalists, used their dominance of the military and judiciary to impose their ideology on elected governments — and to overthrow them when they saw fit. Their infamous coup of May 1960 — the first of several to come — ended with the execution of Prime Minister Adnan Menderes, along with two of his ministers, by a kangaroo court acting on trumped-up charges. Menderes, a hugely popular center-right politician who had simply eased the pressure on religious expression — most symbolically by restoring the Arabic call to prayer that Atatürk had banned — was hanged for the crime of “violating the constitution.”

That is all why, in the early 2000s, the AKP rose to power partly on the strength of a genuine democratic argument: that all these travesties of justice, orchestrated by the secularists for decades, were wrong. The judiciary should not be used as a weapon. Political parties should not be banned or reengineered by unelected powers. Turkey needed more freedom, not less — for everyone, not just religious conservatives, but also Kurds, Alevis, and non-Muslims. Those arguments were correct, and for the AKP’s first decade in power — roughly 2003 to 2013 — they brought it considerable sympathy at home and abroad among liberals and conservatives alike, including myself.

The authoritarian logic had returned, just with different people in charge.

But then the AKP tightened its grip, and the former challenger to the old establishment gradually became an establishment of its own. The turn was visible by 2013, marked by the heavy-handed crackdown on the Gezi Park protests, which turned grimmer after the failed coup attempt of 2016, a genuine shock that led to a massive purge. All opposition forces were denounced as treacherous components of a grand conspiracy against Turkey itself. The authoritarian logic had returned, just with different people in charge.

Meanwhile, the narrative of AKP supporters shifted: In the early years, they were rightly proud that their party was ending the long-standing injustices in Turkey. More recently, they began to justify their own injustices with arguments like this: “These things were done to us in the past, so what’s the big deal? It’s payback time.”

What Ibn Khaldun Understood

There is a medieval scholar, well known across the Arab world and the broader Muslim intellectual tradition, who would have recognized this dialectic: Ibn Khaldun, the fourteenth-century North African polymath who is often described as the father of sociology and historiography. His remarkable treatise, the Muqaddimah, was “undoubtedly the greatest work of its kind that has ever yet been created by any mind in any time or place,” in the words of Arnold Toynbee. And one of its central insights is directly relevant to understanding Turkey today.

The conquerors soon turn authoritarian to preserve their newfound power. Change comes only when a new group of conquerors seizes power — only to then emulate the very establishment that they overthrew.

This is Ibn Khaldun’s famous “cyclical” view of history, which posits that patterns of power and conquest repeat themselves while actors simply shift their roles. He observed this in the rise and fall of desert tribes and city dynasties across North Africa and the Arab world: The hardy, tight-knit nomads of the desert would conquer the soft, complacent rulers of the cities — only to grow soft and complacent themselves, until the next wave of outsiders arrived to repeat the cycle.

A famous factor in this drama was asabiyya — group solidarity, or the cohesive energy of a rising movement, which gives momentum to conquerors but wanes once they become established. Another trend, perhaps even more relevant to modern politics — in Turkey or elsewhere — was what Lord Acton would have recognized as corruption by power. Conquerors of the city, Ibn Khaldun noted, quickly fall in love with their newfound luxury and indulgence. To finance their lavish palaces, extravagances, and big bureaucracies, they resort to oppressive methods — such as forced labor, forced sales and purchases, and crushing taxation — that end up harming commerce and generating widespread discontent.

In other words, the conquerors soon turn authoritarian to preserve their newfound power. Change comes only when a new group of conquerors seizes power — only to then emulate the very establishment that they overthrew.

Breaking the Vicious Cycle

This Khaldunian reading of Turkish politics carries an uncomfortable implication that goes beyond Erdoğan’s AKP: If and when Turkey’s political pendulum swings back, where are the guarantees that the new winners will not do exactly what their predecessors did? What ensures that the CHP, or whatever coalition eventually dislodges the AKP, will dismantle the machinery of repression rather than redirect it?

Turkey’s voters often understand this dynamic intuitively, even if they may not articulate it in Khaldunian terms. Knowing that all sides are likely to play rough when they get the chance, many simply prefer the version of authoritarianism that is practiced by their own political tribe. That is why polarized electorates remain so difficult to move. Partisan voters know that this is either “our time” or “their time,” and don’t want to risk losing the zero-sum-game.

What Turkey needs is yet another such liberal moment — but a more durable one, built not on the goodwill of a particular “conqueror,” but on constitutional guardrails strong enough to survive them.

There is only one exit from this cycle, and it is not the triumph of one side over the other. It is a constitutional order robust enough to constrain whoever happens to be in power — and a political culture that will keep valuing that, instead of finding holes in it just to pursue their narrow group interest. That means genuine judicial independence — not courts that are independent in name and loyalist in practice, but institutions insulated from political appointment and pressure. It means term limits that make power temporary. It means decentralization, so that the loss of the central government does not mean the loss of everything. And it means strong protections for political speech and opposition.

These liberal ideals may sound ambitious for today’s Turkey, but they are not without precedent. There were moments when Turkey moved closer to them — most notably in the era of Turgut Özal in the late 1980s and early 1990s, who championed the “three freedoms”: freedom of thought, religion, and enterprise. Then came the early years of the AKP, when the prospect of European Union accession inspired an unprecedented wave of liberal reforms.

What Turkey needs is yet another such liberal moment — but a more durable one, built not on the goodwill of a particular “conqueror,” but on constitutional guardrails strong enough to survive them. A vision of a better future in which no single tribe dominates, but each finds equal freedom, justice, and dignity.

In other words, while appreciating Ibn Khaldun’s timeless wisdom on the vicious cycles of history, we can still aspire to break them and build something better. That would do wonders for Turkey — and other deeply polarized societies where politics has turned all too tribal, combative, and vicious.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect MBN’s editorial stance.