The new depths of Erdogan’s autocracy

UNTIL THISEUAK week, Turks who could not stomach the autocratic rule of Recep Tayyip Erdogan had one thing to cling to. Their president had locked up journalists and thousands of bureaucrats, gutted state institutions and used a referendum to grab constitutional powers. He had forced the sale of independent newspapers to his cronies, installed his second-rate son-in-law as finance minister and debauched the currency, tipping the country into recession. He had wrecked his country’s relationship with both America and the . And yet, at the same time, he was still governed by one master—the ballot box. Elections in Turkey may not have been terribly fair, but at least they were free.No longer. On May 6th, after weeks of pressure from the ruling party and the president himself, Turkey’s electoral board annulled the election, back in March, of the mayor of Istanbul, Turkey’s largest city and its economic and cultural capital. In that ballot Istanbul’s voters turned their backs on Mr Erdogan’s man, a former prime minister, and by less than 14,000 votes in a total of 8m chose the barely known Ekrem Imamoglu. To Mr Erdogan, this was intolerable. He himself got his start in Istanbul, where he marshalled an impressive record as mayor in the 1990s before becoming first prime minister and then president, in which two roles he has ruled Turkey continuously since 2003. “If we lose Istanbul, we lose Turkey,” he reportedly said in 2017. His response to Mr Imamoglu’s victory was to blame “organised crimes” at the ballot box.