One of the clearest signs that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has abandoned democratic accountability and embraced full autocracy is his quiet yet deliberate retreat from the economic populism that once underpinned his rule. For years, Erdoğan’s government relied on well-timed wage increases, retirement bonuses, and social benefits to hold together a fragile but effective coalition of low-income voters, public servants, and pensioners. This strategy helped the AKP dominate elections and maintain legitimacy, even as authoritarian tendencies began to surface during the Gezi Park protests, intensified with the December 17–25 corruption scandal, and peaked with Erdoğan’s controlled coup on July 15, 2016.
But after securing re-election in 2023, Erdoğan completely changed course. Whether due to economic exhaustion or political confidence—or both—his administration stopped trying to court voters with meaningful financial relief. Public workers saw their wages stagnate in the face of crushing inflation. Retirees, once treated as an electoral goldmine, were largely ignored. The government, increasingly cornered by a collapsing lira, depleted reserves, and spiraling prices, could no longer afford the handouts that had once made Erdoğan’s rule palatable to the working class.
This shift played a decisive role in the AKP’s stunning losses in the 2024 mayoral elections. Voters in many cities who had once given Erdoğan the benefit of the doubt turned against his candidates in droves. It wasn’t merely a matter of opposition messaging or local campaigning—it was about broken trust. The sense of abandonment was felt most deeply by those who had once believed, however briefly, that Erdoğan’s brand of strongman rule still had a place for them at the table.
This is not just about pensions or wages. It’s about a regime that is no longer interested in pretending to serve its people, even when it still faces elections. The economic contract that underpinned Erdoğan’s populist appeal has been broken. And without it, his legitimacy continues to erode—especially in the very cities that once symbolized his rise.
The consequences were immediate. In the 2024 municipal elections, Erdoğan’s party suffered dramatic losses, especially in Turkey’s largest cities. Ekrem İmamoğlu, the charismatic and widely popular mayor of Istanbul, not only retained his position but did so with a commanding margin—despite the regime’s constant legal harassment and politically motivated investigations aimed at disqualifying him.
This wasn’t just a protest vote. It was a powerful statement by urban voters that the regime’s economic neglect and authoritarian drift would not go unchallenged. Ankara, İzmir, and other metropolitan centers followed suit, reinforcing the trend. Turkey’s cities—the very engines of its economy and culture—are now increasingly governed by opposition figures.
Instead of addressing the economic crisis with relief measures or reforms, Erdoğan leaned harder into centralization, repression, and distractions—ramping up nationalist rhetoric, targeting opposition figures, and further controlling media narratives.
Strongmen often rely on economic populism to buy loyalty—until the money runs out. When it does, they pivot to more coercive tools: judicial control, media censorship, disinformation, and repression. Erdoğan’s trajectory mirrors that of other modern autocrats – like Maduro – who begin their rule with genuine popular support but gradually come to rely on coercion and manipulation to survive. Erdoğan’s Turkey now follows this well-worn path. With state coffers empty and public patience wearing thin, the regime is increasingly held together by fear and force rather than consent.
The danger now is that, having lost the economic tools that once secured public loyalty, Erdoğan may abandon meaningful elections altogether—either by suspending them or rendering them hollow through manipulation, intimidation, and repression. In other words, as the economic levers that once underpinned his legitimacy crumble, Erdoğan increasingly turns to authoritarian instruments to maintain his grip on power.
Indeed, there have already been troubling signs. The mass arrests of opposition mayors, court rulings that disqualify candidates on dubious grounds, and the appointment of government trustees in opposition-run municipalities all point to a regime preparing to entrench itself by other means. Erdoğan no longer seeks to win votes—he seeks to eliminate competition. The most shocking development in this trend was the arrest of Ekrem İmamoğlu, Erdoğan’s most formidable challenger.
On March 19, 2025, İmamoğlu was arrested on highly questionable charges, including corruption and alleged links to terrorism. Just a day before, Istanbul University—under intense political pressure—annulled his university diploma, citing decades-old procedural issues in his 1990 transfer from a university in Northern Cyprus. The timing was no coincidence. Under Turkish law, a valid university degree is required to run for president, and İmamoğlu had openly signaled his readiness to challenge Erdoğan in 2028. This was a coordinated political strike—not just against one man but against democratic competition itself. Erdoğan made this very clear by removing his strongest opposition figure from the field through institutional manipulation.
If Erdoğan still had sufficient economic resources at his disposal, he might have continued to maintain his regime within the framework of what some political scientists call a ‘competitive autocracy’—an authoritarian system that retains the façade of electoral legitimacy. But the ongoing economic crisis, coupled with the AKP’s significant losses in the most recent local elections, suggests a shift toward full-blown autocracy and dynastic succession, with Erdoğan grooming his son, Bilal Erdoğan, as his heir.
The battle ahead is no longer just about who governs—it’s about whether governance in Turkey will continue to reflect the will of the people or collapse entirely into one-man and dynastic rule. The latter scenario grows more likely by the day, as Erdoğan tightens his grip on the opposition through legal intimidation, the strategic deployment of personal scandals, and the careful orchestration of a ‘controlled opposition’ that channels public frustration into harmless or counterproductive directions. Turkey stands at a fateful crossroads. And this time, the question is not merely who rules—but how.
By: News About Turkey (NAT)
