How Erdoğan made Turkey authoritarian again

In 2002, the election victory of Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) seemed to herald swift change. Erdoğan broke the army’s stranglehold on politics and society, implemented democratic reforms as part of Turkey’s bid to join the European Union, and made conciliatory inroads toward the country’s Kurdish minority. His victory also heralded an era of unprecedented freedom for Turkey’s press, which had faced restrictions throughout history. Notably, the AKP liberalized the press law, introducing greater protections against state interference, strengthening journalists’ right to protect their sources, and largely replacing prison sentences for certain violations (ranging from “compromising the judicial process” to “encouraging sexual assault, murder or suicide”) with fines. Emboldened by these reforms, newspapers began covering subjects once deemed taboo, like minority rights. “When me and my friends look at the stories we did then, we say, ‘Wow, we were brave,’” Ezgi Başaran, a former newspaper editor in Turkey now at the Oxford’s St. Antony’s College, told me. “There is no way these stories would be published now.”

But true media diversity remained an illusion. A small group of competing tycoons owned most mainstream-media outlets, often influencing the editorial line to their advantage. (Turkish media owners were, and remain, free to invest in other sectors, regardless of conflicts of interest.) Doğan Media Group, then Turkey’s leading media company, owned five major national newspapers and numerous TV stations, including the country’s leading daily Hürriyet and CNN Türk, while also investing in the energy, tourism, and finance sectors.

Self-censorship persisted. Even without explicit threats, many editors and reporters toed an invisible line for fear of legal consequences. Court cases against journalists increased and legislation remained restrictive, despite the new press law. “Insulting” Turkishness, the government, or certain state institutions has also been a crime since the 1920s. Turkey’s constitution guarantees a free press, but also criminalizes reporting that threatens national security. What constitutes such a threat is left deliberately vague. (Similarly, Turkey’s anti-terror law allows the state to prosecute journalists for unspecified “terror propaganda.”) Mehveş Evin, a prominent journalist, told me that Turkish reporters simply did not touch certain topics—like Erdoğan’s family. “But I would still call the time between 2002 and, say, 2011 or 2012 the most pluralistic and free time,” she said.

But in 2007, roughly around the time the AKP won its second election, the climate shifted. Erdoğan, until 2014 Turkey’s prime minister, won a dispute with the strictly secularist military over his choice of president. Then the police stumbled upon an alleged coup plot by a clandestine organization dubbed Ergenekon, prompting a series of high-profile trials, followed by another coup-plot case code-named “Sledgehammer” in 2010. The trials saw hundreds of military officers convicted, along with numerous journalists, judges, and academics. The list of accusations was long: Ergenekon, which was said to include both civilians and military officers belonging to Turkey’s “deep state,” allegedly conspired to assassinate public figures and finance global terror groups with the sale of chemical weapons, among other nefarious plans. But much of the evidence was questionable. Years later, even the government disowned the trials as a sham.