TRT World

[Jay]

 

[Jay]

Not long ago, the Turkish Workers Party, a marginal force, ideologically communist and politically fringe, was dismissed as a relic of Cold War nostalgia. Today, it governs Türkiye.

What happened earlier this year was not a coup in the traditional sense, though many are calling it one. It was a collapse of legitimacy, a kind of ideological revolt against decades of economic stagnation, elite dysfunction, and democratic decay. Into that vacuum stepped Ayşe Arslan, a former academic turned revolutionary, now President, backed by a party that until recently struggled to poll above single digits.

Arslan and her Prime Minister, Yıldız, promised nothing short of a reinvention of the Turkish state. So far, they've delivered — but in ways that have left the country reeling. The Turkish economy, already strained, is in freefall. Inflation has returned with a vengeance. Foreign capital is fleeing. And now, Arslan is reportedly preparing to declare an economic state of emergency that would give her sweeping new powers.

This is not just about crisis management. It is about transformation. Twenty-two billion dollars in private assets were recently nationalized under the justification of "wealth redistribution," a prelude, many believe, to a new centrally planned economy. Thai economists, veterans of Bangkok’s post-crisis socialist experiments, are rumored to be advising Ankara. Whether that advice proves visionary or ruinous remains to be seen.

Arslan and Prime Minister Yıldız Demir appear poised to use the deepening economic crisis as a vehicle to accelerate their ideological project. The expected declaration of an economic emergency would unlock extraordinary powers, enabling the executive to bypass Parliament, override market regulations, seize assets deemed vital to national interest, and impose wage and price controls. Already framed in the language of “economic justice,” such a move would legitimize policies that might otherwise be politically untenable under normal circumstances.

Central to this shift is the push to collectivize significant portions of the economy. State ownership of key industries, workers' councils in factories, and the redistribution of land and capital are no longer abstract goals — they are policy priorities being trialed in real time. Business leaders, particularly in Istanbul and Izmir, have responded with a mix of panic and defiance. Several major firms have relocated assets abroad, and a number of CEOs have reportedly gone into self-imposed exile. But Arslan and Yıldız see in this backlash not a warning sign, but validation proof, they argue, that entrenched wealth is resisting the will of the people. For them, the crisis is not merely economic; it is revolutionary.

The institutional structure of the Turkish state, however, is struggling to contain this new ideological fervor. In a moment that raised alarms across Ankara, Prime Minister Yıldız appeared to suggest the government might suspend Parliament entirely, relying instead on presidential decrees to push through reforms. It's unclear whether this was a trial balloon or a warning shot, but it landed with force.

The Turkish military, long seen as the self-appointed guardian of the republic’s secular and democratic order, has been conspicuously silent in the face of the sweeping ideological shift brought on by President Ayşe Arslan’s government. This silence is not without context. In the early days of Arslan’s administration, hundreds of senior military officials were purged or quietly retired, accused of disloyalty or links to past coup plots. What remains is a hollowed-out officer corps, stripped of its historical autonomy and uncertain of its standing under a government that openly distrusts its role in political life.

Amid that void, the creation of the People's Revolutionary Guard Corps (HDMK) has emerged as one of the clearest signs that Arslan’s regime is building parallel institutions not just to govern, but to protect itself from internal threats, particularly the military. Officially described as a “civilian defense force tasked with protecting the revolutionary gains of the people,” the PRGC is, in practice, a new security apparatus loyal to the party, not the state. Many analysts view it as a preemptive shield against the possibility of a military intervention, a lesson learned from decades of military tutelage in Turkish politics. The PRGC’s growing presence in urban centers and critical infrastructure has sent a clear message: this is a regime preparing not just to lead, but to defend itself at all costs.

Unsurprisingly, street protests have erupted, sporadic but increasingly tense. Türkiye's cities are becoming flashpoints. The state, for now, appears unsure whether to crack down or compromise. That ambivalence is dangerous.

The Turkish government, for its part, insists this is a long-overdue reckoning, a rejection of neoliberalism, a pivot to equity. But even officials within the Ministry of Finance privately admit the current path is unsustainable. The tools of economic revolution, nationalization, emergency powers, centralized planning, require legitimacy, efficiency, and stability. Türkiye today has little of any.

What’s unfolding is not just a story of economic turmoil. It’s a test of whether ideological governance, in this case, a deeply redistributive and authoritarian communism, can take hold within the framework of a post-imperial, post-globalization state.

Arslan's government argues that Türkiye can be remade. The deeper question is: At what cost, and for whom?

 

[Jay]

There’s a tendency, especially in the Western imagination, to see authoritarianism as something swift and cinematic. A military coup. A leader in exile. Tanks in the streets. But in Türkiye, we are seeing something slower, more methodical, and far more insidious. The second wave of purges inside the Turkish Armed Forces has begun not with a bang, but with 820 arrests and the dismissal of over 60,000 soldiers. The justification: “counter-revolutionary ideology.”

What’s emerging under President Ayşe Arslan is a new, distinctly 21st-century model of authoritarian governance ideologically saturated, fear-enforced, and frighteningly adaptable.

At the center of this transformation is the People's Revolutionary Guard Corps, the once-marginal paramilitary force now elevated into a central tool of statecraft. The Guard is not merely enforcing the purges; it is slowly absorbing the functions of the traditional military, taking over security in major cities and, most symbolically, around the presidential palace itself. This is not just a reshuffling of power, it’s a revolution in institutional loyalty. Arslan isn’t just eliminating opponents; she is replacing them with true believers.

Türkiye's new communism is not about state control of the means of production, at least not primarily. While Prime Minister Yıldız is focused on ideological governance, undermining state institutions and coup-proofing the revolution, President Arslan has been focused on ideology building and implementing socialism. However, it is clear that both are aligned that controlling the ideological means of loyalty, the media, the military, and the narrative of the state itself is a necessary step to achieve both of their dreams. As Türkiye's economic and political situation worsens, the government is not loosening its grip but tightening it, as if repression itself can serve as a form of governance. History offers examples, East Germany and Maoist China, but this feels different. This is not a revolution emerging from the streets but one consolidating from the top down.

The role of foreign influence adds another layer of instability. According to a source close to the Turkish Land Forces Command, the crackdown may be proceeding with the “blessings” of Thailand—a state with its own authoritarian legacy. If true, this hints at a growing informal network of illiberal solidarity, where governments share not just arms or trade but tactics for political survival.

Here lies the real tension. For decades, the Turkish military served as guardians of Atatürk’s republican ideals, willing to intervene when civilian governments veered too far into religious or populist territory. Now, that same institution is being hollowed out, disarmed ideologically and structurally. The message is clear, there will be no savior in uniform this time. Arslan got there first.

And so we’re left watching a slow-motion erosion of a state’s core institutions, one that’s happening not under the pressure of chaos, but through its meticulous management. This is what the end of liberal democracy can look like in the modern era: not a collapse, but a transfer of power, of loyalty, of fear from the people to a party.

 

[Jay]

BARCELONA — This wasn’t Sarajevo in 1914 nor Budapest in 1956. But walking through the scorched alleyways of El Raval and watching teens drag debris into makeshift barricades like they were laying the foundation for a nation, I couldn’t help but think, we’re watching the future of sovereignty unfold in real time, and it’s messy.

Catalonia has always been a story Spain tried to footnote. A proud, distinct culture relegated to the margins of national identity of the collective Spanish story. But what we’re seeing now is not just a regional rebellion. It’s a confrontation between two 21st-century visions of legitimacy, one built on institutions and borders, the other on networks and belief.

On the ground, people will tell you it’s about self-determination. On the balconies, it’s about dignity. In Madrid, it’s about the law. But in the backrooms of the Hague and the quiet corners of the Global Assembly (GA), it’s something else: a test of what global governance actually means in the age of identity politics and decentralized insurgency.

Here’s the dirty little secret no one in Geneva or Washington wants to say out loud: the GA is paralyzed. Not because it lacks empathy, but because it lacks imagination. The international system we’ve built since World War II simply wasn’t designed for these kinds of crises, not when the rebels livestream on Twitter, not when secessionists form provisional governments with the help of Google Translate and GitHub.

And so the GA says what it always says: “calls for calm,” “respect for sovereignty,” and “a peaceful resolution through dialogue.” It's the diplomatic equivalent of telling a forest fire to consider its actions.

That’s the question haunting diplomats in Brussels and activists in exile alike. Reformists still believe in the possibility of internal change. They hope the Spanish constitution, that aging holdover from a post-Franco era, might stretch enough to include the dreams of seven million Catalans. But the youth in the streets? The ones blocking tanks with their bodies? They’re done asking for permission.

There are, broadly speaking, two Catalonias now.

The first is institutionalist, led by politicians, lawyers, and former ministers. They still speak the language of negotiation, still see a path back to the Spanish state, reformed and federal. They want to work from the inside, maybe with international mediation, maybe even under GA supervision.

The second Catalonia is post-institutional. It's rebel fighters in a tunnel under the Generalitat with a satellite uplink and a map drawn on the back of a pizza box. It’s the firefighters, police officers, and security services ignoring orders from Madrid. It’s teenagers guarding intersections like they were checkpoints in the Spanish Civil War. It’s what happens when people stop believing their votes matter and start believing only visibility does.

One wants a deal. The other wants recognition. The irony is that both will probably lose if the world keeps pretending this is just an internal matter.

The question facing global affairs isn’t whether to intervene in Catalonia, but whether the West can develop a new vocabulary for secessionist movements. Because this isn’t just about Spain. It’s about Quebec. It’s about Scotland. It’s about Taiwan. It’s about any place where people are trying to redraw lines that were drawn by someone else’s grandfather.

For every diplomat arguing for non-interference, there’s an activist saying, If your global order can’t protect peaceful people from their own government, what’s the point of it?

Yes, sovereignty matters. But so does legitimacy. And when those two ideas collide, when armored vehicles roll into cities that are technically part of your own nation, global leaders have a moral obligation to do more than issue tepid statements.

If Madrid overplays its hand, it will lose not just Catalonia but the moral high ground in Europe. If the rebels fragment or turn violent, they risk becoming another cautionary tale in the West’s long history of crushed independence movements. Either way, the question remains: how do we as a planet respond to these moments of rupture?

We are entering the age of networked nationalism. Movements born in group chats, armed with GoPros and Reddit threads. And the structures built in Bretton Woods and Geneva simply aren’t ready. We need a new toolkit. One that respects sovereignty but also human dignity.

Until then, the people of Catalonia will keep asking a question no one in power wants to answer. If we are not allowed to leave peacefully, were we ever free at all?

 

[Jay]

BARCELONA — When armed police escorted former Commander Júlia Riera into the National Court under floodlights and riot shields, Spain insisted it was simply enforcing the law. But laws, as every constitutional crisis reminds us, are only as legitimate as the people who believe in them.

What began as a regional standoff over autonomy is fast becoming a test of what the international system actually stands for in 2006: sovereignty or self-determination, order or recognition, process or legitimacy.

On August 1, a separatist coalition known as the Free Catalan Assembly, backed by disaffected municipal police and remnants of the regional emergency services, seized control of government buildings in central Barcelona. Calling the operation “Albatross,” they declared a transitional Catalan republic and demanded international recognition. The Spanish government, in response, invoked Article 155 of the Constitution, suspended Catalan autonomy, and deployed military and national police forces to reassert control.

Civilian casualties have been reported. Communications remain unreliable across much of the region. The images of young people manning barricades, of armored vehicles rumbling through Plaça Sant Jaume, have already become emblems for a generation disillusioned by what they see as the decay of democratic accountability.

And yet, the international response has been muted.

Since the end of World War II, the liberal international order has operated on a fundamental premise that within sovereign borders, change should occur through dialogue, ballots, and the slow machinery of reform. What Catalonia and other emerging movements around the world are revealing is that this machinery is grinding to a halt.

Júlia Riera, for all her tactical militancy, represents a deeper crisis in democratic systems. She emerged not from the fringe, but from disillusionment with institutions that offered participation but no transformation. To her supporters, she is not a criminal but a symbol. The consequence of political failure rather than a cause of it.

Let’s not pretend we don’t see what’s happening in Catalonia. A liberal democracy has arrested a former military officer turned separatist commander. Armed police flood the streets. Protesters chant in the square. There is blood on the pavement in El Raval, livestreamed on social media, and yet in the Hague, in Washington, in Paris, there is only silence, or worse, law.

The arrest of Júlia Riera was supposed to be a demonstration of the Spanish state’s strength. Instead, it became a window into something deeper and far more destabilizing: the inability of the international liberal order to grapple with demands that don’t fit neatly into the institutions it built.

They are political emotions that have always sat uncomfortably inside liberalism's procedural shell. What do you do when the ballot box fails, the courts defer, and the Constitution becomes a cage? What happens when people stop asking to be represented and start asking to be seen?

This is what the end of liberal imagination looks like. Not just at the national level but globally.

A source from Spain’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA), confirmed to TRT an aggressive diplomatic lobbying campaign in the days since the request for an emergency session at the Global Assembly. According to sources familiar with the effort, Madrid’s representatives warned that allowing peacekeepers into Catalonia would “irreparably erode” the principle of non-interference in domestic constitutional affairs.

The pressure appears to have worked.

Poland, citing the “looming specter of urban warfare,” proposed a limited peacekeeping mission with mandates for civilian protection and infrastructure stabilization. But major powers, including France and the United States, refused to back the measure. A senior Spanish diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, described the response to the proposal as “well-intentioned but legally untenable.”

Türkiye and Portugal aligned with Madrid. Only Australia seemed to have backed Poland, according to the Spanish diplomat.

Not because these countries don't see the danger, but because they fear the precedent. If Catalonia, why not Scotland? Why not Quebec? Why not Balochistan, or Xinjiang? The message was clear however, the Global Assembly’s member states may profess concern, but few are willing to redraw the lines that hold their own states together.

And that’s the uncomfortable truth that liberal democracies are deeply ill-equipped to handle the question of illiberal self-determination. What if a people democratically choose to leave a democratic state? What if they do so not because they are oppressed in the traditional sense, but because they no longer feel part of the story?

For decades, the postwar order relied on two fictions: that borders are sacred and that liberal institutions can evolve to contain new demands. Catalonia, like so many other regions around the world, is showing that neither assumption holds. Not anymore.

What we’re witnessing isn’t just a constitutional crisis in Spain. It’s a philosophical crisis for the West. Can liberalism accommodate deep identity without suppressing it? Can a rules-based order survive when people believe the rules were written without them?

And so, we arrive at a moment of clarity. The question is not whether Catalonia will gain independence. It is whether liberal democracies can remain legitimate when their only answer to secession is suppression.

The military may restore order. The Global Assembly may issue its statements. But legitimacy is harder to recover than territory. And once a generation loses faith in the institutions that claim to represent them, the world doesn’t go back to normal. It reorganizes itself.

If the West appears paralyzed, then the East is watching and it is moving.

Thailand, long seen as a regional middle power, has emerged as the most vocal supporter of an alternative model one based on “communitarian sovereignty,” a mix of democratic socialism and regional autonomy rooted in collective cultural identity. Leading academics across the West are warning that the Catalan crisis “illustrates the moral exhaustion of the Western order” and that many may see the need for a new international compact that recognizes “the legitimacy of collective selfhood.”

Thailand’s soft power is growing, especially in parts of Europe and Asia, where states are increasingly skeptical of Western double standards. In this context, Catalonia becomes not just a local rebellion, but a proxy for a wider contest between two visions of world order: one institutional, rules-based, and increasingly brittle; the other fluid, identity-driven, and still taking shape.

Madrid has reclaimed administrative control, at least for now. But sovereignty regained by force is rarely a long-term solution. A new generation of Catalans, networked, decentralized, ideologically agile, has seen what visibility can do. They have watched their hashtags trend and supporters chant for them across the globe. They do not fear illegitimacy; they see themselves as the leaders of a new global movement.

Whether the world accepts them or not, the question lingers. If we cannot imagine a legitimate form of exit within liberal democracies, are we not declaring that democracy itself is forever bound by the choices of previous generations?

We may be watching the first sparks of a post-liberal world.

And no one is ready.

 

[Jay]

Ankara — In a move that underscores the complex entanglement of nationalism, solidarity politics, and ideological posturing, a spokesperson for the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) publicly expressed solidarity with the Catalan independence movement, urging the Turkish government to do the same during President Arslan’s official visit to Madrid. The spokesperson called on Ankara “to stand with the Catalan people in their just demands for self-determination,” framing the Catalan struggle as parallel to Kurdish aspirations in Türkiye and beyond.

What might, at first glance, appear to be a marginal statement from a small coalition partner to President Arslan, the move reflects how transnational movements, especially those grounded in leftist, anti-statist ideology, continue to map their own struggles onto global currents. That

The Turkish Workers’ Party (TİP), in coalition with the pro-Catalan PKK and aligned factions, did not remain silent. In an act of symbolic defiance, the PKK's parliamentary leader donned the red and yellow of the Catalan Senyera during a parliamentary session, declaring: “Solidarity is not criminal. The people of Catalonia have the right to decide their own destiny, just as every oppressed people does.”

Yet this solidarity, while ideologically coherent within radical leftist traditions, comes at a political cost. It further distances the coalition from Türkiye’s political mainstream and risks Arslan's mission to build a belt of partners in the Mediterranean as she faces domestic upheaval over her failed economic reform plans.

Ayşa Arslan, the TİP leader and one of the most visible faces of Türkiye’s new communist coalition, now faces a dilemma with few easy exits. Arslan’s visit to Madrid was originally framed around trade and energy diplomacy, but the PKK’s public appeal has added a new layer of tension. Does she raise Catalonia, as her coalition partner urges, risking a diplomatic rupture with Spain? Or does she remain silent, opening herself to criticism from within her own movement that she is compromising revolutionary values for the sake of statecraft?

This is where the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) and Ayşe Çiller have given Arslan very little options. Touted as a pro-democracy leader and a symbol of a new Türkiye, Çiller rejected the Catalan cause outright. “We must be clear that the Catalans have acted unlawfully, and the Turkish Republic does not support separatism or terrorism in any form,” Çiller said during a heated exchange in parliament. “Spain and Türkiye are both the only sovereign states within their borders.”

That may sound uncontroversial except that it underscores a deeper, largely unspoken truth about Turkish politics. For all its democratic aspirations, the political center remains deeply conservative on questions of territorial integrity, both at home and abroad.

For Çiller, support for democracy stops when it challenges the structure of the state. For Arslan, that means she must either side with the opposition against her own coalition or risk upsetting Madrid and align with her coalition partners. The PKK's solidarity with the Catalans, along with other armed Kurdish factions like TAK and the YPG, should be a warning sign.

But solidarity, to be effective, must be strategic as well as moral. The PKK’s endorsement of Catalonia, while rhetorically potent, may serve only to complicate the situation for Catalan leaders, associating their cause with armed struggle in the eyes of European publics.

What makes this moment distinct is not that Türkiye’s left supports separatists, it’s that it does so from inside the system. The PKK’s transformation from armed insurgency to parliamentary actor may be controversial, but it also reflects a deeper shift in Türkiye’s democratic experiment. The question is whether the system can accommodate this kind of radical pluralism or whether it will recoil from it. Likewise, the TİP’s performance of support risks reinforcing their political marginality in Türkiye, where nationalist sentiment remains dominant across party lines.

As President Arslan meets with Spanish officials, it is unlikely she will heed the PKK’s call to raise Catalonia. Still, the incident offers a snapshot of Türkiye's political contradictions: a ruling party that rails against Western hypocrisy while quietly aligning with European states on the question of territorial integrity and an opposition that cries for democracy and decrying statism while quietly aligning with Spanish statism and Franco-era authoritarianism.

 

[Jay]

Ankara — It’s not every day you see a crowd of a million people standing shoulder to shoulder in a city under surveillance, guarded by men in revolutionary uniforms and watched by a state that has forgotten how to blink.

But that’s exactly what happened this past weekend in Türkiye’s capital, Ankara. Under the glare of drone cameras and the heavy boots of the People’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, a pro-democracy rally led by Ayşe Çiller and a newly reawakened Republican People’s Party (CHP), in the heart of a country being slowly and systematically reprogrammed.

Organizers claimed over a million showed up. The police said it was closer to 300,000. But here’s the thing: either number is staggering in a country where protest has become synonymous with a prison sentence.

Call it the “Ankara Spring,” call it a last stand, or call it what one student told me it felt like: “a candlelight vigil for a republic we still believe in.” What matters is that it happened and that it didn’t fizzle.

It is tempting, even comforting, to describe what’s happening in Türkiye as a straightforward story of repression and resistance. A charismatic new opposition leader, Ayşe Çiller, stands before an enormous crowd in Ankara and declares, “Atatürk left us a republic, and we will fight for that republic.” The symbolism is unmistakable. The echoes of Solidarity in 1980s Poland, are difficult to ignore.

But the reality, as it so often is in post-liberal societies, is more complicated and more unsettling.

It’s true that Türkiye today bears little resemblance to the multiparty democracy of a decade ago. Since the rise of President Ayşa Arslan and the Turkish Workers Party, the state has pursued an aggressive ideological project: a fusion of Marxist-Leninist economics, revolutionary populism, and nationalist aesthetics, dressed in the language of equality and anti-imperialism. Free markets are being dismantled. Political parties have been co-opted or banned. Surveillance is ubiquitous. The space for dissent is shrinking.

In that vacuum, Ayşe Çiller and the reconstituted CHP have found something resembling purpose. For years, the party was an empty shell, too cautious to resist, too elite to inspire. But the rally in Ankara signals that its long dormancy may be ending. It has chosen, finally, to stop playing the role assigned to it by the regime: the official loser meant to legitimize an illegitimate system.

Let me pause here to say: I’ve been watching the CHP for two decades. For much of that time, it was the Turkish opposition’s answer to Microsoft in the 1990s meaning it was big, respected, sluggish, and completely out of ideas. Under Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, it was a party that didn’t just lose elections; it lost the will to oppose.

But something changed. Çiller stood at the center of the rally and didn’t mince words: “Atatürk left us a republic,” she declared. “The CHP will fight for that republic, with our voices, with our votes, with our bodies if we must.” And then, perhaps most provocatively, she demanded the release of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, another opposition leader arrested for simply reading a poem.

While Kılıçdaroğlu was content to support the banning of the Islamist Refah and Nationalist MHP parties to save his own skin, Çiller has made it clear that she is fighting for everyone and not just her own party. For a party rooted in anti-Erdoğanism, this was a profound ideological turn.

What does it say about democracy when it becomes less about ideas and more about the principle that everyone should be allowed to have them? It says, perhaps, that something deeper is happening not only for the opposition but also for the regime.

The regime still craves democratic legitimacy. It allows rallies like this weekend’s to go forward under heavy guard, yes, but without outright suppression. The state wants to be seen not merely as powerful, but as popular. This suggests something more than mere authoritarianism. It is ideology married to performance. A revolution that wants to be loved.

The Revolutionary Guards were everywhere blocking streets, scanning faces, and cordoning off side alleys. There was no crackdown this time, just the quiet hum of state intimidation. Notably, the regime didn’t ban the rally. That’s telling.

Because while the government of Ayşa Arslan wants to rewrite Turkish society from the factory floor up, collectivizing the economy, dismantling liberal institutions, and replacing money with labor tokens, she either is deeply committed to workers' democracy or sinnically craving international legitimacy.

But if I’m sitting in Beştepe, the Turkish Kremlin, I’d be nervous. Because this wasn’t a protest. It was a movement in embryo. And movements, once they gain rhythm, tend to find their destination. Perhaps that is why, unlike President Arslan, who has tolerated dissent, her right-hand Prime Minister Eda Yildiz has wielded an iron fist to root out all semblance of the Kemalist regime.

The regime still controls the courts, the security forces, and the economy (what’s left of it). But legitimacy, that most intangible and essential political currency, is starting to leak out of the system. Yildiz has taken on the military, purging it of its senior officer corps. She has taken on the courts, eliminating their jurisdiction to challenge the government. She has broken the grip of the Kızılay and hijacked the meiroctratic civil service process in lieu of ideological purity tests. She has even taken on her own financial institutions trying to riddle it with ideological muck. Yet as Çiller gains traction, it seems other elements of the Turkish state are rebelling.

The General Staff, whose chairman is rumored to be under house arrest, issued a clear warning to the Socialist Republic of Thailand and, indirectly, Turkey’s own government. The statement accused Thailand of meddling in Turkish affairs and warned that"Our forces have decisively eliminated any attempts at undermining the Republic and have repeatedly shown our willingness to act when necessary to preserve peace, stability, and national unity."

Just last week, the Central Bank gave a lifeline to the banking and financial system and approved a multi-billion dollar financial package, began selling dollars to save the lira, and put a muzzle on the Lira-Labor Tokenization Project. No doubt, Prime Minister Yildiz is fuming, and she has one person to blame. Ayşe Çiller.

One thing I’ve learned studying the collapse and recalibration of democratic experiments in the Middle East is that people rarely fight for liberalism itself. They fight for belonging, for dignity, for the right to be taken seriously. In that sense, the crowd in Ankara wasn’t just protesting to support the CHP, but the deeper fear of widespread repression.

The pro-democracy camp has become an identity. And in authoritarian contexts, identities are more powerful than arguments. The Turkish regime has built itself around a tightly controlled narrative that only it represents the "people," and that all dissent is either bourgeois sabotage or imperial interference. Çiller's rally punctuates that fiction.

This is what makes the Turkish moment so difficult to parse for Western observers. It’s not simply a story of authoritarian repression. It is a story of ideological contestation between two visions of democracy, with one that prioritizes equality through control, and another that prioritizes liberty through compromise. Both claim to speak for the people. Both believe they are the true heirs of the Republic.

Which means we are no longer asking whether democracy will return to Türkiye. We are asking which version of democracy will win.

 

[Jay]

When Abdullah Gül stepped onto the stage in the conservative heartland of Konya this past weekend, he wasn’t just addressing a crowd. He was answering history. The former president, long thought a spent force in Turkish politics, stood beneath a banner that read “Adalet ve İrade” (Justice and Will) and called for nothing less than the rebirth of Muslim democracy in a land where faith and freedom have long been forced into a false opposition.

“We will bring down absolutism in all its forms,” Gül declared, his voice uncharacteristically sharp, echoing across the Konya square where tens of thousands had gathered in defiance of the regime’s ban on unauthorized political assembly. “Whether dressed in red banners or black robes, tyranny has one face and one destiny.”

Just a month earlier, the Communist regime arrested dozens of members of the Refah Partisi, the party Gül helped revive from the ashes of political exile. Their crime? Calling for local councils to be elected freely and urging mosques to remain open for prayer and public dialogue. In the eyes of the ruling junta, even prayer is a subversive act, especially when it inspires democratic thought.

Back in the early 2000s, Türkiye seemed poised to chart a different course one where Islam and democracy didn’t cancel each other out, but completed each other. That was Abdullah Gül’s promise, and for a time, it worked. He wasn’t an Islamist in the traditional sense. He was a Muslim democrat, a man who believed that religion should inform values, not write law. That freedom of conscience, not compulsion, was the cornerstone of faith.

He once modeled his thinking on Europe’s Christian Democrats, those center-right parties that blended religious ethics with democratic norms and market economies. For Gül, the analogy wasn’t cosmetic. He believed in a future where Türkiye didn’t need to choose between Mecca and Brussels, minaret and parliament.

But that future never came. The post-revolutionary regime, cloaked in Marxist rhetoric but drunk on raw power, shut down the democratic experiment just as it was beginning to flourish. What replaced it was neither a socialist utopia nor secular equality but an ideological machine that feared mosques, books, and ballots in equal measure.

Because Türkiye is once again a bellwether. What happens here doesn’t stay here. If a Muslim-majority nation can fuse piety with pluralism, if it can prove that religious belief can animate democratic participation rather than subvert it, then a new model becomes possible not just for Türkiye, but for Cairo, Amman, and Riyadh.

You can’t simply secularize your way to democracy in the Muslim world. Islam is not a private hobby or lifestyle accessory, it’s a public good, a source of meaning and identity. Pretending otherwise, as Türkiye's communist rulers have done, is not only dishonest, it’s unsustainable.

Democratic legitimacy in the Muslim world must take faith seriously. Gül does. His politics don’t start from a rejection of Islam but from its moral and spiritual imperatives: justice, consultation (shura), and human dignity (karama).

Of course, none of this will be easy. Gül is not a revolutionary; he is, by nature, a cautious statesman. But in this moment, even he seems to understand that moderation must sometimes wear the mask of militancy, not in method, but in message.

His call in Konya was unambiguous: civil disobedience, peaceful protest, and political organizing at the neighborhood level. Not just opposition to the regime, but opposition to fear itself.

“We are not fighting for an autocratic state,” he told the crowd, “but for a democratic state where Muslims, and everyone else, can live in dignity. This is not a struggle between red and green. It is between the people and the prison.”

In challenging the regime now, he is offering Türkiye a way out of the false binary it has lived under for too long: Secular tyranny or religious authoritarianism. Gül reminds us, a third way. In the heart of a people who still remember what democracy once felt like, and who now dare to believe it can return.