There is a dangerous question hanging over modern Turkey and it is not whether President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has supporters. Of course he does. The more uncomfortable question is whether citizenship still means having rights when you do not support the president.
A democracy is supposed to make disagreement ordinary. In Erdoğan’s Turkey, disagreement increasingly looks like a security problem.
The distinction matters. A government can defeat an opponent at the ballot box, criticise a newspaper, prosecute a politician or defend a controversial law. But when courts, prosecutors, police, regulators and administrative authorities repeatedly become instruments through which political opposition is constrained, citizenship begins to acquire conditions.
The experience of Ekrem İmamoğlu has become emblematic. The Istanbul mayor and Erdoğan’s principal political challenger has spent prolonged periods in detention while facing extensive legal proceedings. Human Rights Watch has described the broader campaign against the Republican People’s Party as threatening political association and meaningful electoral competition.
This is where the argument becomes larger than one politician. What happens to the student who protests? The journalist who investigates? The lawyer who represents an inconvenient defendant? The mayor who belongs to the wrong party? The citizen who refuses to applaud? What happens to the Kurdish activist, the secularist, the feminist, the LGBTQ+ demonstrator or simply the Turkish citizen who thinks the government is wrong?
The answer increasingly seems to be: first prove that your disagreement is not a crime. That is an extraordinary reversal of democratic logic. In a healthy democracy, the government must justify restrictions on citizens. In an increasingly authoritarian political system, citizens find themselves having to justify their innocence to the government.
The machinery is familiar. Protest becomes “public disorder”. Journalism becomes “misinformation”. Political criticism becomes “insult”. Opposition becomes suspicious association. Human-rights advocacy can become a legal liability. Amnesty International has documented intensified prosecutions and detentions involving journalists, opposition politicians, lawyers and human-rights defenders, alongside restrictions on peaceful assembly and association.
And then there is the press. A country does not need to formally abolish newspapers to destroy press freedom. It can make critical journalism financially dangerous, legally hazardous and professionally exhausting. It can fine broadcasters, prosecute reporters, restrict platforms and frighten editors until self-censorship does the government's work for it. Reports on Turkey describe extensive pressure on independent and opposition media and prosecutions of journalists for criticism of the government.
The genius of authoritarianism is often not that it silences everybody. It is that it teaches everybody to calculate the price of speaking. And yet Erdoğan's supporters have rights. That is precisely the point.
Their freedom to organise, vote, demonstrate and express political loyalty should be protected just as fiercely as the freedoms of his opponents. Democracy is not supposed to punish people for supporting the government. Nor is it supposed to punish them for opposing it.
The problem begins when political loyalty becomes an unofficial passport to full citizenship. Turkey is not a country without elections, opposition parties or citizens capable of resisting political pressure. It is more complicated and therefore more troubling than that. Millions of Turks continue to contest power, protest, publish, organise and vote. The question is whether the institutions around them will permit those rights to mean what they are supposed to mean.
A state does not prove its democratic character by protecting the people who agree with it. It proves it by protecting the people who do not. That is the uncomfortable test facing Erdoğan's Turkey. Not whether Erdoğan can command loyalty, but whether a Turkish citizen can look at the president and say, “I disagree with you,” without first wondering whether the state will come looking for him.
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