On December 17, a court struck down the protest bans imposed after the arrest of Istanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu back in March. Weeks earlier, prosecutors had finalized an indictment meant to keep İmamoğlu, the leading opposition figure, jailed indefinitely. Together they show a system under strain, making parallel use of repression and legal tactics to entrench its control.
Turkey is now a frontline case of lawfare: the weaponized use of the judiciary to political ends. If the jailing of Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva revealed the damage that lawfare can do to the democratic process, Turkey shows how far it can go in hardening authoritarian rule. Left unchecked, it will not remain an exception but set a precedent for attacks on democracy elsewhere.
The Lula blueprint is now being reproduced against İmamoğlu, the center-left challenger to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, in a harsher authoritarian setting. In today’s Turkey, lawfare has expanded beyond a way of managing the opposition into a means of recalibrating the state itself.
İmamoğlu is the presidential nominee for the Republican People’s Party (CHP), which after the 2024 local elections overtook Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) for the first time in decades. Throughout 2025, national polls placed İmamoğlu ahead of Erdoğan, making his party one of the largest center-left forces across Europe and the Middle East.
The severity of the shift from electoral competition to criminal prosecution is visible even outside the courtroom. Authorities have banned the display of İmamoğlu’s posters and the circulation of campaign materials, treating his visibility as a security risk.
Brazil’s Lava Jato investigation established the strategy for all this. Prosecutors placed Lula at the center of a schematic “criminal network,” and a coordinated media offensive branded him the “maximum leader” of a criminal organization, isolating him and barring his return to an…
Auteur: Kemal Büyükyüksel
