On Thursday morning, at precisely 9:05 A.M., the Turkish Republic stood still. For sixty seconds, sirens wailed across Istanbul, ferry horns resounded along the Bosphorus, and traffic stopped in front of Dolmabahçe Palace, the one-time home of the sultans. This is how Turkey marked the seventy-eighth anniversary of the death of its founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.

The brief pause came after ten fraught days for the country. On October 31st, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, continuing to purge his opposition under the guise of the state of emergency he declared following a failed coup attempt, in July, ordered the imprisonment of the editor of the left-of-center daily Cumhuriyet, along with a dozen of the newspaper’s leading journalists_._ He then ordered the detention of lawmakers from the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party, or H.D.P., including the party’s co-chairs, Selahattin Demirtaş and Figen Yüksekdağ.

The official justification for the actions against both the newspaper and the H.D.P. leadership came in the form of terrorism charges. Erdoğan’s government claims that Cumhuriyet has ties to Fethullah Gülen, the reclusive cleric who has lived in exile, in Pennsylvania, since 1999, and that the newspaper was involved in the July coup attempt, which many Turks believe Gülen orchestrated. The H.D.P. lawmakers, meanwhile, have been accused of collusion with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K., an armed nationalist group that has fought the Turkish government for decades. Evidence for the charges against both the journalists and the lawmakers is questionable.

Erdoğan has long-standing grievances against both Cumhuriyet and the H.D.P. In late 2014, after Turkish border gendarmes unwittingly stopped Turkish intelligence agents from crossing the border into Syria with an arms shipment, Cumhuriyet broke the story, broadcasting video of the incident on its Web site. The ensuing controversy stymied Erdoğan’s support of pro-Islamist rebels inside of Syria, briefly undermining Turkey’s influence in that country’s civil war. Even worse, from Erdoğan’s perspective, was that his Justice and Development Party, or A.K.P., then performed poorly in the national elections held in June, 2015, falling short of a governing majority for the first time since coming to power, in 2002. Many Turks voted for the pro-Kurdish H.D.P. as a way to register a protest against Erdoğan’s excesses.

The A.K.P. retook its majority in a snap election held last November, but the H.D.P. retained its reputation as Turkey’s most credible opposition party—making Erdoğan’s latest actions all the more devastating for it. In the wake of the failed coup, Demirtaş, one of the party co-chairs, took a principled position against the plotters, standing in solidarity with Erdoğan’s government and the concept of Turkish democracy. “We have never seen a coup bring stability and democracy,” he said in July. But he then went on to issue a warning about the state of emergency that Erdoğan had called for: “The government said that the state of emergency will only be aimed at the coup plotters....If the authorities start to ban speeches, demonstrations, or opposition media under cover of any operation against the putschists … we will understand that the use of the state of emergency is being abused.” That warning now appears prophetic.

Erdoğan’s government has long done little to hide its neo-Ottoman aspirations. Erdoğan’s ultimate goal is a constitutional referendum granting him unprecedented executive powers, but to pass it he needs a two-thirds majority vote from Turkey’s five-hundred-and-fifty-seat parliament. His A.K.P. party currently holds three hundred and seventeen seats, meaning he needs to pick up an additional fifty votes. The H.D.P., which holds fifty-nine seats, had represented an obstacle. But with its leadership now under lock and key, the party's seats are in limbo. All eyes in Turkey now turn to the remaining non-A.K.P. lawmakers in parliament. Will they go along with Erdoğan to avoid the H.D.P.’s fate? If so, Erdoğan may soon hold power more akin to an Ottoman sultan than to the leader of the republic as envisioned by Atatürk, the man the country mourned this week.