Autocratic Legalism vs. Lawfare

On the 8th of October, Turkey marked a grim milestone: 200 days of Ekrem İmamoğlu, the Mayor of Istanbul and the opposition’s most promising challenger to President Erdoğan, behind bars – without an indictment. His absence from the campaign trail is no accident. Four days after his detention, on 23 March, İmamoğlu swept the Republican People’s Party’s presidential primaries, securing a record of 15 million votes and cementing his role as the central figure of the opposition. He was arrested the same day.

İmamoğlu’s arrest followed a series of events that unfolded earlier that month; first revocation of his university diploma – a constitutional requirement for presidential candidacy –, and his detention on corruption and terrorism charges. The use of law to suppress or intimidate social opposition fits a familiar pattern in Turkey’s recent political history. But the İmamoğlu case also marks an escalation. Here, the government is not merely instrumentalizing the courts to marginalize and silence opponents, it is weaponizing the judiciary in an acute political battle to cast a shadow on elections.

The machinery of judicial coercion

The campaign against İmamoğlu began long before March 2025. Since his first term as Mayor of Istanbul in 2019, he has faced more than a hundred judicial and administrative investigations. The most emblematic example is the Fool Case,launched over remarks he made during a press conference. In 2022, a first-instance court sentenced him to two years and seven months in prison and imposed a four-year political ban.

Pressure intensified in 2025. On 11 April, the state seized İmamoğlu’s companies. On 19 June, his lawyer was arrested. Legal strikes extended to his party, Republican People’s Party (CHP) itself: lawsuits sought to annul the party’s 38th Congress, its 21st Extraordinary Congress, and the Istanbul Provincial Congress. On September 2, an Istanbul court suspended the party’s provincial leadership, citing alleged irregularities in the 2023 Congress, and appointed a trustee in its place.

Recently, on 19 September, an appellate court upheld the prison sentence and political ban in the Fool Case, and consequently barred İmamoğlu from running as CHP’s candidate in the upcoming presidential elections. The verdict still awaits review by the Court of Cassation, but the bench is stacked with government loyalists, leaving little hope for reversal.

Diploma revocation and political ban together expose the careful orchestration of this campaign. The ban technically allows an independent candidacy, but the annulment of his diploma bars him from presidential eligibility permanently. Furthermore, it is evident that diploma annulment was politically calculated to weaken İmamoğlu’s ties with the CHP, pressuring the party to sideline its most popular leader.

Seven months after 19 March, it has become clear that the incumbent aims to reshape the political landscape through coercive measures. It now leans on the judiciary as its primary instrument of control, treating legitimate opponents not as competitors but as enemies. The question, then, is how to understand this deliberate and meticulously orchestrated use of judicial power.

Autocratic legalism or lawfare?

Cem Tecimer refers to “lawfare” in the title of his post to make sense of these recent events. At the same time, he cites Kim Lane Scheppele’s work on “autocratic legalism”. This dual reference gives the impression that both terms are interchangeable in describing the judicial coercion faced by electoral opponents in Türkiye. Yet, this is not entirely accurate.

Autocratic legalism examines how legal frameworks and institutions become instruments for eroding democratic systems. In this context, law operates not as a constraint on authoritarian rule, but as a tool to mask and legitimize the consolidation of autocratic power. Following Scheppele, the conventional understanding of autocratic legalism focuses on legal reforms that progressively weaken the ability of political opposition groups to compete and win elections. Although Scheppele refers to judicial reforms and court-packing, her emphasis lies on dismantling checks on executive authority – not on sidelining or silencing political opponents. She observes that election rivals may be harassed with nuisance criminal charges, but they do not end up in jail, or at least not for long (p. 578).

Hence, autocratic legalism neglects the coercive side of law, and particularly the coercive side of judicial action. On the contrary, the emphasis on legal reforms fosters the impression that authoritarian transformation unfolds in a relatively peaceful manner, relying more on consent than coercion. This is, in fact, what Scheppele stresses: for her, the defining feature of autocratic legalism is transformation of democracy into brute majoritarianism “through nonviolent means” (p. 579).

In this regard, judicial lawfare offers a better conceptual fit to capture the predominance of judicial coercion over other legal strategies directed against the political opposition. Lawfare refers to the strategic use of law with the aim of delegitimizing, weakening, or eliminating an adversary. It is a modern method of warfare that treats the legal sphere as a battlefield, where law operates according to the logic of war. In this framework, judges and prosecutors act as the “soldiers” of political power, while law itself becomes the “weapon.” Closely intertwined with the notion of the “weaponization of law”, lawfare suggests that victories in courts translate into strategic advantages in the broader political struggle.

The concept of lawfare has already been incorporated into studies of democratic backsliding. An illustrative example is the 2016 arrest of Uganda’s main opposition leader Kizza Besigye, charged in connection with the deaths of two protestors after a wave of demonstrations. The strength of this concept lies in how it directly captures political power’s deployment of the force of law, particularly criminal law, against political opponents to drive them out of the political arena. Therefore, it makes the coercive dimension of law visible.

Conclusion

In Türkiye, democratic backsliding has never relied solely on legal reforms. From the prosecution of protesters and journalists to the targeting of high ranking military officiers, academics and artists, it has consistently been accompanied by judicial coercion. Yet since the local elections of March 2024 – a serious setback for the ruling party – judicial coercion has overtaken reform as the dominant instrument of control. By mid-2024, opposition mayors were removed one by one under corruption or terrorism charges, with trustees installed in their place.  Today, 15 mayors remain in detention and 13 municipalities are under state-appointed trustees.

Against this backdrop, the lawfare waged against İmamoğlu and the CHP is not incidental. It is a calculated response to the incumbent’s dwindling electoral strength. Two implications stand out: First, the government’s willingness to bypass the ballot box signals that it no longer intends to relinquish power through peaceful and competitive elections, marking the shift to a hegemonic authoritarian regime. Second, in the absence of broad societal support after more than two decades in office, it increasingly treats the opposition not as rivals but as adversaries, deploying the judiciary as its main weapon.

The removal of the most formidable political challenger before an election through judicial action is exactly what defines the current moment. İmamoğlu’s case shows that political competition is being conducted with a warfare mindset and risks deepening coercion in the months ahead.