Just days before Turkey’s main opposition party was set to select its next presidential candidate, the leading contender, Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, was arrested and jailed, effectively removing him from the race. In this brazen act of political suppression, the Turkish government has taken a momentous step toward full-fledged autocracy.

The scheme to take Imamoglu out of play was calculated and thorough. On Tuesday, Imamoglu’s alma mater, Istanbul University, revoked his diploma—by law, Turkish presidential candidates must possess university degrees—citing alleged violations of Higher Education Board regulations. The next day, Imamoglu was arrested on charges of corruption and terrorism. These court rulings not only derail his presidential ambitions but also oust him from his position as mayor of Turkey’s largest city and economic powerhouse.

For years, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been removing checks on his own power and manipulating state institutions to give his party electoral advantages, but until now, the Turkish opposition has been able to field viable candidates to contest his rule. In Imamoglu, opposition groups thought they had found a candidate who could finally defeat Erdogan in a head-to-head race. By forcing the Istanbul mayor out of politics, the government has crossed the line that separates Turkey’s competitive authoritarian system from a full, Russian-style autocracy in which the president handpicks his opponents and elections are purely for show.

The road to autocracy

During his more than two decades in power, Erdogan has dismantled Turkey’s democratic institutions, consolidating his control into a system of one-man rule. After a failed coup attempt by military officers in 2016, which Erdogan and his party linked to a movement whose members populated other branches of government and public institutions, Erdogan brought the judiciary under his authority by purging thousands of judges and replacing them with loyalists who rubber-stamp his crackdowns. The media have been muzzled; more than 90 percent of Turkish media outlets are owned by pro-government businesses, and independent journalists are routinely jailed.

The country still holds elections, but the system is highly skewed. It is a textbook case of a competitive authoritarian regime, one that mimics democracy while systematically tilting the playing field in favor of the ruling party. Opposition parties are active, there are real public debates about politics, and incumbents sometimes lose. Yet with the government controlling the judiciary, stifling independent media, and weaponizing state institutions to weaken its opponents, electoral competition is far from fair.

Even so, Erdogan’s rule remains vulnerable as long as opposition candidates can contest elections. His margin of victory, typically, is relatively narrow; in the runoff round of the 2023 presidential election, Erdogan won with 52 percent of the vote. He has sometimes resorted to more extreme measures to keep himself and his party ahead. In the 2019 municipal election in Istanbul, when Imamoglu defeated the candidate from Erdogan’s party, authorities annulled the result and forced a rerun—only for Imamoglu to win again by a wider margin. Erdogan’s most dangerous tactic, however, is jailing his strongest rivals. Selahattin Demirtas, the charismatic Kurdish politician who challenged Erdogan in the 2014 and 2018 presidential races, has been behind bars since 2016 (he ran his second campaign from prison) on dubious terrorism charges. Imamoglu was also sentenced to a prison term, in 2022, on charges of insulting a public official. But because the case is still pending appeal, the sentence has not prevented the mayor from running for office again.

Erdogan doesn’t just want to protect his presidency—he also wants to reclaim Istanbul.

In the last year, Erdogan has removed several elected mayors belonging to opposition parties and replaced them with government-appointed ones. Journalists, politicians, human rights activists, even the country’s top business group have become targets of bogus court cases. But Imamoglu’s arrest this week is a significant escalation. The terrorism and corruption charges are far more serious and thus carry far greater consequences than the charges in his pending 2022 case. And unlike Demirtas, who was popular but was never more than a third-party candidate, Imamoglu presents a direct threat to Erdogan’s presidency. By removing this rival from the field, Erdogan has shown that he is uninterested in maintaining the façade of competitive elections. Instead, he seeks the kind of autocratic system that Russian President Vladimir Putin has, one with no real opposition and no electoral surprises.

Erdogan is now dangerously close to achieving what he wants, and he is following a similar path to the one Putin took in Russia to get there. Two decades ago, Russia was not the tightly controlled autocracy it is today. The country’s economy was booming, and Putin was genuinely popular, so he tolerated some opposition and left parts of the democratic system intact. But after the 2008 financial crisis, as economic growth stalled and antigovernment protests erupted, Putin responded with repression. And in 2020, he fully cemented his rule as an unchallenged autocrat. Constitutional amendments were passed that allowed Putin to stay in power until 2036. His regime went into overdrive arresting, exiling, or silencing even its most marginal critics. In August 2020, Kremlin operatives poisoned the activist Alexei Navalny, Putin’s fiercest opponent, in an attempt to kill him. (Navalny later died in a Russian penal colony in 2024.) Today, Russian elections are a mere formality. Real challengers are banned while Putin selects a few token opponents to create the illusion of competition. The outcome is never in doubt.

Just like Putin’s, Erdogan’s repression has intensified as his popularity has waned. Key constituencies, including Turkey’s youth, are growing disillusioned. Frustrated by Erdogan’s increasingly authoritarian policies and a lack of economic opportunity, many young Turks are contemplating emigration. A nationalist backlash against the government’s policies that allow millions of Syrian refugees to live in Turkey is growing.

Erdogan’s confidence in his position at home may be misplaced.

Erdogan’s biggest headache is the country’s ailing economy. Turkey has been battling inflation and economic deterioration since 2018. After years of unorthodox policies championed by Erdogan—policies that many economists argued were worsening the crisis—a new finance minister abandoned the old approach but has so far been unable to turn the economy around. The country’s leading business group, the Turkish Industry and Business Association, has openly criticized the new economic program; in response, Erdogan accused the group of undermining the government. Meanwhile, Erdogan’s approval has taken a hit. In the 2024 municipal elections, even though Erdogan used all the state power at his disposal to help his party win, the ruling party suffered its largest-ever defeat.

Erdogan’s growing crackdown on the opposition over the past year has been an effort to halt that momentum. And that means stopping Imamoglu. A political outsider before he entered the mayoral race in 2019, Imamoglu shocked the establishment by ending the ruling party’s 25-year hold on Istanbul—the city where Erdogan launched his own career. Despite Erdogan’s relentless efforts to unseat him, Imamoglu handily won reelection last year, proving his broad appeal beyond his party’s traditional secular base. With his party set to back his presidential bid—the next election is scheduled for 2028 but may be called sooner—Imamoglu became a formidable challenger to Erdogan’s rule.

These moves, if they stick, would firmly block Imamoglu’s advancement. The nullification of his diploma disqualifies Imamoglu from running for president, and the terrorism charge removes him from the mayor’s office. Erdogan doesn’t just want to protect his presidency—he also wants to reclaim Istanbul. Losing the city to the opposition in 2019 was not only a political setback but also a financial blow. It cut Erdogan off from the city’s vast resources, which have fueled his patronage network for decades. Getting Istanbul back could help keep his political machine running at a time of economic difficulty. Removing the mayor allows Erdogan to install the Istanbul governor—a handpicked appointee—in his place.

Risk taker

Erdogan is playing a high-risk, high-reward game. If he succeeds, he’ll head into the next election against an opponent he chose himself, effectively securing his rule for life. This power grab suggests he believes he can act with impunity. He may be right. Opposition parties and political institutions lack the means to constrain him. And although many people in Turkey are angry, the public, too, feels it has little recourse against the president. The last time Erdogan faced mass protests was in 2013, and the state responded brutally—security forces killed several people, injured thousands, and made mass arrests. Since then, Erdogan has clamped down on public gatherings to ensure that demonstrations never reach the same scale again.

The Turkish leader is also taking advantage of an exceptionally permissive international environment. U.S. President Donald Trump’s return to the White House has emboldened Erdogan; he does not fear a U.S. reprisal now that Trump is actively undermining U.S. democracy and showing zero interest in holding foreign autocrats accountable for their repression. Trump’s overtures to Putin have also rattled European leaders, compelling them to reengage with Turkey in hopes of shoring up their defenses against Russian aggression—and they are most likely willing to ignore Erdogan’s deepening autocracy if it means securing Ankara’s support.

But Erdogan’s confidence in his position at home may be misplaced. The last time he tried to sideline Imamoglu it backfired spectacularly. The forced rerun of the 2019 mayoral election in Istanbul, which Imamoglu won narrowly, infuriated many voters, who saw it as unjustified interference by the government. In the second vote, Imamoglu won by a larger margin—the biggest for an Istanbul mayor in decades.

More important, Erdogan may aspire to be like Putin, but Turkey is not Russia. Unlike Russia, which thrives on resource wealth, Turkey’s economy is deeply dependent on foreign investment. Investors are already fleeing as the county grows more authoritarian, and a slide into full autocracy will hardly bring them back. The Turkish economy would remain mired in crisis. And even a strongman must deliver results to maintain his grip on power.

Gonul Tol is director of the Middle East Institute’s Turkish Program and the author of Erdogan’s War: A Strongman’s Struggle at Home and in Syria