Comparative Authoritarianism
By 
I haven’t been doing due diligence in following news in other countries, in large part because developments in the United States exhaust so much of my mental bandwidth. But I was dimly aware that, over in Türkiye (aka “Turkey”), President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) are looking at an increasingly unfavorable political landscape. So Erdoğa did what any other self-respecting autocrat would do: he threw the leader of the opposition in jail.
As Beril Ackerman, writing in Bloomberg’s invaluable “Balance of Power” newsletter, explains:
Political analysts love to draw similarities between Russia and Turkey.
A court case against the Turkish opposition is intensifying questions of whether the country is on the brink of a Russia-style autocracy.
The main opposition Republican People’s Party, or CHP, its Chairman Özgür Özel and his administration face a hearing that could see them removed and replaced with a trustee.
The concern is the trustee might be a pro-government figure or a less dynamic opposition politician, like 76-year-old former CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, meaning the ballot box effectively loses its meaning for voters.
[…]The speculation is that Erdoğan wants to prolong his more than two-decade rule in the 2028 elections despite not being allowed to run beyond two terms.
Since local elections last year, the CHP — under its charismatic leader Özel — has seen a meteoric rise. While polls are unreliable, it’s now seen as beating Erdoğan’s AK Party at the ballot, and the opposition has pressed for early elections.
For Özel and his party, the cases against them amount to an existential threat. “If the CHP goes, Turkey will go too,” Özel has said.
This is obviously dispiriting for those of us who think that all human beings deserve governments who respect their rights and accept accountability for their decisions, especially at the ballot box.
But Americans should care for more parochial reasons: the playbook that Erdoğan used to transform Türkiye into a competitive-authoritarian state involved some of the same tactics and tools that the Trump administration is now employing in the United States. Countries like Russia, Hungary, and Türkiye provide glimpses into our possible futures. We may learn something from studying the failures of overseas pro-democracy forces. At the very least, the variation across these cases should helps us anticipate — and thus, one hopes, prepare for — the range of techniques, tactics, and capabilities the Trump administration might employ as its tries to further consolidate power.
