In Foreign Policy magazine, Salim Çevik explains a new tactic being used by Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his allies in the country’s judicial system, to control the opposition parties. After decades of simply destroying new parties that arise to challenge him, Erdogan’s new tactic is to capture them from the inside and neuter them. Çevik writes:

Turkey’s authoritarian descent has blown by many milestones over the past decade: the post-2016 purges; the imprisonment of prominent politicians such as Selahattin Demirtas, then a co-leader of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP); the systematic takeover of municipalities run by pro-Kurdish parties; the prosecution of CHP mayors; and the jailing of Imamoglu. Each drew warnings that Turkey had crossed a point of no return. But all of these, however damaging, shared a common logic: They were about repressing the opposition—disabling actors, constraining the institutions, and narrowing the space within which opposition could operate.

The sharpest version of that logic was the imprisonment of Imamoglu in March 2025. By jailing the figure most likely to defeat him in the next presidential race, Erdogan made clear that he was no longer content to make opposition difficult; he wanted to ensure that no credible rival could win. That was a threshold of its own.

The May 21 ruling goes beyond even that. The target is no longer an individual, a mayor, or a municipality. It is the party itself, the institutional vehicle through which any future challenge to Erdogan would have to be mounted.

The regime had experimented with such tactics before. In 2016, when Devlet Bahceli faced an internal challenge inside the far-right Nationalist Movement Party, a sequence of court rulings blocked a planned extraordinary congress and protected his leadership. The party soon entered an alliance with the government.

Such interventions are even more pernicious than party closures, which have been a regular feature of Turkish politics. From the Welfare Party, banned in 1998, to a long line of Kurdish parties (the People’s Labor Party, Democracy Party, People’s Democracy Party, Democratic Society Party, and the HDP), the Turkish state has repeatedly used the courts to shut political movements down.

But this is a blunt instrument. The movement behind a banned party usually reemerges under a new name, with the same cadres and the same voters. Welfare became the Virtue Party, and Virtue gave rise to both the Felicity Party and Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP). Kurdish parties have reappeared again and again. Banned parties also tend to acquire the political capital of victimhood, which can make them stronger in their next incarnation than they were before.

With the May 21 ruling, the CHP nominally remains intact. Its name, its parliamentary group, its hundreds of municipalities, its members, and its voters all remain in place. What has changed is who runs it. And the political meaning of that change is clear: The leadership that now-ousted CHP head Ozgur Ozel has built since 2023—more combative and electorally successful—has been removed by judicial order, while the leadership that Erdogan spent years describing as harmless has been restored to its place.

Read more here.