Turkey Book Talk

Turkey Book Talk #272 – Doruk Erhan, doctoral candidate at Yale Law School and visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law, on the crackdown on Turkey’s main opposition CHP.

The conversation is based on Doruk’s recent articles for the Verfassungsblog, including his recent assessment of the legal and political impact of cases against jailed Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, published on the first anniversary of his arrest.

Since then the crackdown has escalated, with the judicially engineered return of Kemal Kilicdaroglu as its chair. These manoeuvres have led pundits to warn Turkey is shifting to a post-democratic system of arbitrary rule, in which elections are essentially meaningless.

The articles makes a relatively optimistic case for Turkey’s opposition, and the interview also weighs up potential future scenarios and the international context that has facilitated the crackdown.

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Read a transcript of the interview on Substack.

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