Ayça Alemdaroğlu is a research scholar and associate director of the program on Turkey at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University and a global fellow at Peace Research Institute Oslo.
Turkey’s democratic future hinges on its opposition parties doing something few expected: winning elections in unfair conditions. Yet the opposition’s strong performance in local elections suggests that they may be putting together a winning formula for Turkey and beyond.
Turkey’s ruling party has developed a new tool: When its local candidates lose, it dismisses them and appoints its own choice under a guise that maintains the veneer of democracy. It is an autocratic innovation that may soon spread.
