[OPINION] The architecture of Erdoğan-
20.08.2026
By Turkish Minute
Source:https://www.turkishminute.com/2026/08/20/opinion-
Adem Yavuz Arslan*
Turkey’s democratic decline over the past decade is usually recounted through a familiar list: journalists jailed, media outlets shut down, judges removed, opposition politicians prosecuted, civil servants dismissed by emergency decree and executive power increasingly concentrated in the hands of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
All of this matters. But it tells only part of the story.
To understand how Erdoğan has remained politically resilient despite economic crises, soaring inflation, the sharp decline in the value of the Turkish lira, electoral setbacks and growing public dissatisfaction, we need to ask a different question:
What did Erdoğan build after July 15, 2016?
The Turkey that emerged from the attempted coup on that date was not simply a more repressive version of the country that existed before it. A new political economy gradually took shape — one in which executive power, national security, public employment, government contracts, welfare distribution and political loyalty became increasingly intertwined.
That may be the most consequential — and least examined — legacy of July 15.
July 15 was an accelerator, not the beginning
Turkey’s authoritarian turn did not begin with the attempted coup. Pressure on the media, the politicization of the judiciary, the collapse of the Kurdish peace process and Erdoğan’s efforts to expand executive power all predated 2016.
July 15 did not create authoritarianism from scratch. It dramatically accelerated a process already underway and removed many of the political and institutional constraints that had slowed it.
The coup attempt was bloody and traumatic. More than 250 people were killed and an elected government faced an attempted military overthrow. Any democratic state would have had both the right and the obligation to investigate the plot and prosecute those responsible.
But what followed went far beyond prosecuting the perpetrators.
Erdoğan gradually transformed the defeat of the coup into the founding narrative of a new political order. It had heroes, traitors and martyrs. At its center stood the “national will.”
Bridges were renamed. Memorials and museums were built. July 15 became a national holiday, and its imagery became a permanent part of state ceremonies and Erdoğan’s political vocabulary.
The “New Turkey” that Erdoğan had invoked for years finally had an origin story. It was no longer presented simply as the political project of the Justice and Development Party (AKP). In the official narrative, it was an order defended with blood by the Turkish people themselves.
That shift had profound consequences. Once a government presents itself not merely as the voters’ temporary choice but as the embodiment of the nation and the state, its opponents can more easily be portrayed as something more dangerous than political rivals.
They can become security threats.
The emergency rule ended. Its logic survived.
A state of emergency was declared days after the coup attempt and presented as a temporary response to an extraordinary threat. Yet many of its consequences became permanent.
Hundreds of thousands of people were investigated. Tens of thousands were jailed. More than 125,000 public employees were dismissed by government decree. Media organizations, schools, associations and companies were closed, seized or transferred to government control.
The crackdown initially targeted followers of the faith-
Kurdish politicians, journalists, academics, civil society figures and other government critics increasingly faced an expansive interpretation of “terrorism” and “national security.”
The formal state of emergency eventually ended. Its political logic did not.
Security was no longer merely one area of government policy. It became a method of governance. Ordinary political disputes could be presented as matters of national survival. The boundary between dissent and terrorism became increasingly blurred in political rhetoric, while extraordinary legal tools became part of everyday politics.
But repression alone cannot explain the durability of the system Erdoğan created. At the same time, the state itself was being rebuilt.
From personal power to institutional architecture
The 2017 constitutional referendum was the decisive institutional turning point. Turkey voted, while still under emergency rule, to replace its parliamentary system with an executive presidency.
The office of prime minister was abolished. Presidential powers expanded dramatically. The separation between the presidency and party leadership disappeared, and the bureaucracy was increasingly reorganized around the presidency.
What had begun as post-
This distinction matters. To say simply that “Erdoğan became more powerful” is to miss the deeper transformation. The state was increasingly redesigned to operate around him. Personal power was being embedded in institutions.
And those institutions were not limited to the police, prosecutors, courts or security agencies. The economy became a central pillar of the new order.
The paradox of the post-
One of the most revealing statistics about post-
In 2016, approximately 3.56 million people worked in the public sector. By June 2026, that number had risen to roughly 5.4 million — an increase of around 1.8 million people.
The significance of this expansion becomes clearer when placed alongside the post-
It grew dramatically.
This apparent contradiction offers an important clue to the political economy Erdoğan constructed. The purge was not simply about removing people from the state. It also had the effect of rebuilding the state with different personnel and networks.
Old bureaucratic networks were dismantled. New personnel entered. Institutions were reorganized. New relationships of loyalty, opportunity and dependency emerged.
This is particularly striking when compared with the economic philosophy of the AKP’s early years. When the party came to power in 2002, its vocabulary was almost the opposite: fiscal discipline, privatization, European integration, foreign investment, competition and a reduced role for the state.
The private sector would expand. The state would retreat.
More than two decades later, Turkey still has a large and dynamic private economy. But the state has become a far more important distributor of economic opportunity. It directly employs millions. It is a major customer for private companies. Municipalities control substantial economic resources, while the government distributes welfare and social assistance.
Licenses, public procurement, infrastructure projects, credit and investment decisions can all put the state at the center of economic life. As political control over the state increased, the distance between political power and the distribution of economic opportunity narrowed.
The economic dimension of authoritarianism
Analyses of authoritarian systems usually focus on coercive power.
Who controls the police? Who controls the courts? Who controls television?
Those questions remain essential in Turkey. But another deserves equal attention:
Who controls economic opportunity?
When millions of households receive their income directly from the state, when companies depend on government or municipal contracts and when large segments of society rely on public welfare systems, the relationship between citizens and the government changes.
This argument requires an important qualification. It would be wrong to assume that
Turkey’s more than 5 million public employees vote for Erdoğan. Nor can every public-
The mechanism is more structural than that.
When the state becomes one of the country’s largest employers and distributors of economic resources, an ecosystem can emerge in which political power and economic security become increasingly difficult to separate.
No official needs to tell a civil servant, “Vote for us or lose your job.” Modern patronage can be far more sophisticated. People may begin to calculate not only their current salary but also their children’s employment prospects, their company’s chances of winning a contract or their family’s access to social protection under the political system that distributes those opportunities.
That is the economic dimension of authoritarianism.
Elections and the expansion of the state
The timing of some of Turkey’s largest expansions in public employment is therefore worth examining.
Ahead of the 2018 elections, subcontracted workers were transferred to permanent
public-
These policies had legitimate social dimensions. Subcontracted workers had genuine
demands for job security and employment rights. But the large-
Clientelism — a system in which political support is rewarded with jobs, benefits or access to public resources — does not require an explicit exchange of jobs for votes. A government can achieve something more durable by positioning itself at the center of the country’s economic security network.
The four pillars of the Erdoğan model
The system that emerged after July 15 can be understood through four mutually reinforcing mechanisms.
The first is coercion: the judiciary, expansive counterterrorism laws, pressure on the media and restrictions on civil society.
The second is institutional centralization: the presidential system and the erosion of checks on executive authority.
The third is permanent securitization: the practice of presenting political competition as a security threat through references to July 15, terrorism, national survival, foreign enemies and the “national will.”
The fourth is economic distribution and dependency: public employment, welfare, procurement, municipalities, infrastructure projects and economic networks organized around the state.
These are not separate features of the system. They reinforce one another.
The security narrative legitimizes centralization. Centralization facilitates control over economic resources. Control over resources strengthens networks of dependency and patronage. Weakened institutions, meanwhile, reduce the political cost of suppressing challengers.
And elections continue throughout.
That final point is crucial to understanding contemporary Turkey.
An authoritarianism that still needs elections
Erdoğa did not abolish elections. Opposition parties have not been eliminated. Turkey still has a vibrant political society, and opposition candidates can win major contests.
They captured İstanbul and Ankara. In the 2024 local elections, the AKP suffered a major nationwide setback.
Turkey therefore cannot be adequately explained through comparisons with classic military dictatorships or totalitarian states. The distinctive feature of the system is not the elimination of elections but the creation of an asymmetric electoral arena in which the government has substantial advantages over its opponents.
The opposition can compete. It can even win. But it does not compete only against another political party.
It faces an incumbent political bloc with extensive influence over state resources, public employment, regulatory institutions, government procurement and much of the media environment.
The ballot box survives. The playing field is no longer level.
This is what makes Turkey such an instructive example of 21st-
From prosperity to dependency
In Erdoğan’s early years, economic performance was his strongest source of political legitimacy. During the first decade of AKP rule, per capita income rose, inflation fell, infrastructure expanded and a new conservative middle class emerged.
The implicit political bargain was straightforward: prosperity in exchange for political support.
By the second half of the 2010s, that bargain was becoming increasingly difficult to sustain. The Turkish lira lost much of its value. Inflation surged. The independence of the central bank was increasingly questioned. Erdoğan’s unorthodox monetary experiment imposed enormous costs, and the cost of living became one of the country’s main political concerns.
Under normal circumstances, economic deterioration on such a scale should pose a
threat to the survival of a long-
Yet Erdoğan survived.
One reason is that the political economy of Erdoğanism had changed. Performance-
The state could contribute to economic insecurity through its policies while simultaneously becoming one of the principal institutions through which citizens sought protection from that insecurity.
That paradox helps explain the resilience of Erdoğan’s rule. An economic crisis can weaken a government. But the political effect becomes more complicated when the same government also controls many of the mechanisms through which people seek shelter from that crisis.
Erdoğan built more than an electoral machine
Erdoğan’s political skills remain part of the explanation for his longevity. So do his cultural ties to conservative voters and the opposition’s failures at crucial moments.
But those explanations are insufficient.
Erdoğan has done more than win elections. He has helped construct a system capable of reproducing political power between them.
That distinction matters. Popularity can decline. Institutional arrangements, patronage networks, media ownership structures, bureaucratic cultures, judicial structures and economic dependencies can endure.
Successful authoritarian consolidation does not merely strengthen a leader. It can also raise the institutional and economic cost of replacing him.
What Erdoğan built after July 15
Ten years after the attempted coup, much of the debate still revolves around what Erdoğan destroyed: judicial independence, media pluralism, civil service protections, parliamentary government and institutional checks and balances.
All of these losses matter. But concentrating only on destruction misses the deeper transformation.
The question is not simply what disappeared after July 15. It is what replaced it.
Erdoğan built a highly centralized presidency. He entrenched a political culture of permanent security mobilization. He expanded the economic reach of the state and tightened the relationship between political authority and economic opportunity. And he turned July 15 into a foundational narrative that could be invoked to legitimize the new order.
The result is a system in which coercion and consent, elections and inequality, nationalism and economic dependency can coexist.
This is why Turkey matters far beyond its borders.
Twenty-
Sometimes the tanks fail.
And the elected leader who survives them uses the emergency that follows not to abolish democracy overnight, but to redesign the state around his power — through emergency decrees, appointments, contracts, constitutional changes, security crises and, crucially, elections.
That may ultimately be the most enduring political legacy of July 15.
*Adem Yavuz Arslan is a journalist with over two decades of experience in political
reporting, investigative journalism and international conflict coverage. His work
has focused on Turkey’s political landscape, including detailed reporting on the
2016 coup attempt and its aftermath, as well as broader issues related to media freedom
and human rights. He has reported from conflict zones such as Bosnia, Kosovo and
Iraq, and has conducted in-
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Turkish Minute.