Erdoğan’s High-Stakes Game: Crushing One Opposition, Co-opting the Other
Massive political engineering is underway in Turkey since October last year, as two opposition parties find themselves in “parallel realities” --with their voters divided between hope and despair.
Amid tension and unpredictability, the most undercovered story at the moment is that of Turkey. This is despite the fact that, as ever before, what happens there does not stay there.
The turmoil on the domestic stage is in constant escalation. The focal point is the two major opposition parties — the secular/centrist CHP and the pro-Kurdish DEM. At the time of writing, there is further progress regarding both. As a result of the clampdown on CHP-run municipalities based on corruption charges, there are now 16 CHP mayors and at least 230 people linked to local administrations under arrest.
This means that more than one-third of Turkey’s population has temporarily or permanently lost touch with the leaders they elected at the local level.
President Erdoğan chose, in his loud and blunt style, to describe the CHP as “the biggest theft gang in the history of the Republic, the most brazen organized crime group ever.” His wording signalled further mass arrests to come.
His harsh accusations also follow reports from yesterday that a new presidential bill to remove immunity for 61 CHP deputies — including Özgür Özel, its chairman — has been presented to Parliament.
As Erdoğan was speaking today at an AKP meeting, another major development was underway. Abdullah Öcalan, the jailed PKK leader, addressed the public via video for the first time since his arrest in 1999.
Repeating once more that the PKK was dissolved, he called for disarmament.
“The PKK movement, which was based on the denial of [Kurdish] existence and aimed at establishing a separate state, and the national liberation war strategy it relied on, have been brought to an end,” he said, adding, “existence (of the Kurdish identity) has been recognized. Therefore, the main objective has been achieved. In this sense, it (the armed struggle) has run its course. The rest could only have been seen as excessive repetition and a deadlock.”
It was announced from Ankara, simultaneously, that a small group of PKK militants would, in the Ranya district — between Sulaymaniyah and the Qandil Mountains in the Kurdish region of Iraq — lay down their arms in a symbolic ceremony on Friday. The event will not be televised live, as opposed to the announcement earlier, citing “security concerns”.
So, in a broader context, the two political opposition forces and their supporters and voters are pushed even further into two parallel realities — one of anger and despair, the other, of hope.
What we observe is entirely unprecedented — perhaps a “first” in political history. The ruling bloc under Erdoğan — composed of the AKP and its ally, the ultra-nationalist MHP — proceeds in what should be seen as a “double process”, in which the CHP — the second-largest group in Parliament — faces wide-scale criminalisation, and the DEM, accommodation.
That this massive undertaking — arguably Erdoğan’s highest-stakes gamble ever — displays political engineering of the highest magnitude is obvious.
The endgame? To consolidate the super-presidential, vertical, oppressive system further, force the opposition to toe its line, and guarantee a lifetime rule for Erdoğan, following a playbook of Putin or Aliyev.
Let’s, then, go back a bit to put it in context.
After the 2013 Gezi protests (still echoing as a political and legal tool to keep social opposition under control), Turkey entered a phase of what can only be described as a “continuous civilian coup” — a fluid process with a clear frame, method, and destination: “On to full-bore dictatorship,” as described by Howard Eissenstat, Associate Professor of History at St. Lawrence University, and a non-resident scholar at Stockholm University’s Institute for Turkish Studies.
Until recently, many local observers had resisted acknowledging the final destination — despite all the strong signs. But the government’s open targeting of the main opposition CHP seems to have finally awakened even the most hesitant pundits and naive scholars, triggering widespread use of terms like “threshold of authoritarianism crossed” and “farewell to illiberal democracy.”
It’s difficult to understand why the earlier moves— constitutional violations, the judiciary’s subordination to the executive, the destruction of independent media, and years of brutal repression — weren’t enough. Perhaps people wanted to believe that hope alone could drive change. This was, for a very long time, the prevailing mood.
But until this moment of reckoning, the rule of law had long since eroded. Separation of powers — a cornerstone of any democracy — had all but disappeared. The executive is now firmly anchored in the two ruling parties’ state-building project. The judiciary, especially after the most recent Judges and Prosecutors Council (HSK) elections, is nearly fully under its control. Parliament functions largely as a rubber stamp.
Today, however, the situation is more severe and acute than ever. The century-old secular republic — albeit with a “quarter-democracy” throughout its history — is now being transformed into a hardline, security-focused regime, rooted in the ultranationalist traditions of Ziya Gökalp — the pre-Republic “Turkist” ideologue — and Talaat Pasha, its brutal executioner during WWI — now revitalized through the Erdoğan-Bahçeli alliance.
Their shared vision is a staunchly centralized order — under the banner of the “Turco-Islamic Synthesis” — that excludes even whatever is left of the most basic elements of democracy.
What’s new is the criminalisation attempts targeting the main opposition, along with coaxing the pro-Kurdish party into the recalibration of state codes. Yet for total consolidation, the two main opposition parties — CHP and DEM — needed to be either co-opted, neutralized or punished.
The government’s recent persistent rhetoric around “national survival” is no accident. It reflects a deliberate strategy to meet the convergence of systemic crisis and economic collapse with an even more aggressive power grab, “hopefully” by being inclusive all opposition parties.
Since October 2024, this plan has accelerated: Erdoğan and Bahçeli met a day before the opening of Parliament’s legislative session on October 1 last year, aligning on a roadmap that soon became clear — to reshape the constitution and secure their continued rule under the guise of a new “Domestic Front” (“İç Cephe”).
The goal was to gain 400 parliamentary votes (out of 600 in total) to pass a new constitution without a referendum. But the ruling bloc’s seats fall about 25 short of that threshold. Thus, two obstacles remained: DEM and CHP — the two strongest opposition groups in the Grand National Assembly.
Bahçeli moved first, leveraging the symbolic and legal weight of PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan’s “Right to Hope,” and converting a purely legal human right, dubiously into politics, to attract DEM into quiet cooperation. Though Bahçeli was the one who initiated the new “peace process,” DEM found itself — voluntarily — carrying out political visits to other parties for persuading them to join the “process”, that actually should have been conducted by the government.
Erdoğan followed up by issuing clear threats to the Kurdish Political Movement that, in essence, meant the outlawed PKK “dissolve and disarm or face total annihilation.”
In short, this is a sui generis form of “impositional conflict resolution” or “solution at gunpoint” that leaves no room for an honorable exit for any of the parties involved.
Soon after, Erdoğan opened a second front. From late 2024 onward, a new campaign began: a “kneel or be destroyed” approach, targeting CHP as a whole, especially through the municipality of Istanbul, where Ekrem Imamoğlu was seen as the potential rival to remove Erdoğan from power in the next elections.
This move had three objectives: First, to remove his charismatic İmamoğlu from political activity through murky punitive measures; second, to push the CHP leadership into an impasse, where it will feel immense pressure to align with the ruling bloc on a new constitution granting Erdoğan new terms of presidency; third, to tighten control over financially dependent local governments.
Objectively, this seems a well-calculated, cunning plan to shift Turkey into a “full-fledged autocracy.”
Did the CHP, which for years had a timid stance based on “we are untouchable,” have any preparedness that it would be its turn one day? The shockwave that followed the arrests does not leave room for an optimistic answer.
Did the DEM, on the other hand, foresee that as long as an all-out war escalated against the CHP, “peace” (meaning “social peace”) would be a very hard objective to reach? It may not have, at the outset. But when the latest wave of the crackdown led to the arrest of the Mayor of Adana, Zeydan Karalar — known to be the “cleanest” of all the CHP politicians and a true “social democrat” — DEM leadership slightly changed its tune, criticizing the government for the ongoing oppression and underlining that “it may jeopardize the peace initiative.”
Let’s turn to the vantage point of Erdoğan.
Is the “strategy of acquiescence” working?
To a large extent, yes. Media suppression has intensified geometrically. Street protests, such as those following the LeMan cartoon incident, have been met with threats. Public space presences have been increasingly criminalized. CHP rallies gather fewer and fewer people.
A key part of the plan is keeping DEM and CHP apart. As CHP leaders and mayors face waves of arrests, DEM feels it should do its outmost not to rock the boat.
Meanwhile, as the government intended, some CHP supporters — especially in media circles — are turning increasingly hostile toward DEM and Kurds, with a nationalist tone. Divisions remain strong, signalling higher social tensions ahead.
Still, President Erdoğan is taking the biggest gamble of his political career with this dual strategy. He has raised the stakes to their highest level, possibly in pursuit of one final “decisive strike” to secure full authoritarian control.
Will it work? Highly likely.
Erdoğan and Bahçeli have so far succeeded in keeping DEM and CHP in separate lanes, and they maintain firm control over the judiciary and bureaucracy. Erdoğan is also emboldened by his recent meeting with Trump, who generally shows zero interest in Turkish domestic politics.
For the EU, Turkey is now just a convenient “third actor” for defense cooperation — causing it to keep an extremely low profile about the latter’s domestic developments.
The engineering seems to work also because — despite massive partisan, polluted polling — the two most reliable recent surveys show the AKP 3.5 points ahead of the CHP, matching its May 2023 results. Erdoğan’s approval rating has even risen, so far due to foreign policy moves. It should also be taken for granted that, if he manages the PKK’s “dissolve and disarm” process with minimal concessions and without much fuss, his rating will rise even further, driven by social enthusiasm, based on Turkey’s paternalistic political culture — reasserting his image as the “strongest leader ever.”
But failure is also possible.
The public’s number one concern is the economy. In a most recent poll from June, 57% opposed Bahçeli’s “terror-free Turkey” plan, and 71% said a new constitution signed by the AKP, MHP, and DEM would not be democratic.
While the PKK has formally dissolved, and may hold a symbolic ceremony to hand over a small number of arms, it still withholds final disarmament, its “farewell to arms”, demanding legal reforms. If the state insists on “taking everything, giving nothing,” the process could disrupt, drag or even collapse.
As for CHP, though pressure is intense and its party congress may have been declared invalid by a court, the goal appears to be drawing Özgür Özel and his team into backroom negotiations with the ruling bloc. Özel recently said: “Erdoğan is trying to bribe me with leadership in exchange for surrendering the party to government control.”
This leaves the CHP trapped: resist, and face more repression, fragmentation, and even annihilation; comply, and become a tool for legitimizing Erdoğan’s new regime — just as it was co-opted during the 2016 “Yenikapı moment,” when Erdoğan, following the murky coup attempt, managed to drag the CHP into full-scale support of the ruling bloc and paved the way for a key referendum in 2017, which resulted in the shift to a super-presidency.
Thus, the impasse is obvious.
“The Turkish government envisions it in such a way that the CHP will continue to exist, but only as an empty shell,” said Howard Eissenstat — Associate Professor of History at St. Lawrence University — to Stuttgarter Zeitung. “The AKP is steering the country toward a system like that in Egypt or Russia.”
Perhaps, Azerbaijani model, seemingly admirable by Erdoğan, might even be more appropriate.
The chain of events, all in all, shows how masterfully Erdoğan shapes his game, dares to take risks, achieves gains, and thinks far more deeply than his challengers.
All this seems to be happening with Trump’s blessing and quiet dismissal by the EU. So we are all here, watching a hundred-year-long Turkish experiment aimed at full-scale democracy doomed to fade away.
The mind-boggling part is seeing how all the democratic allies of Turkey seem to have bought into this idea.
Unprecedented, indeed.