Rethinking Regime Transformation in Turkey: A Reading in Light of Mahir Çayan’s Concept of “Covert Fascism”

Recent judicial interventions targeting the leadership of the main opposition party, decisions affecting internal party dynamics, and attempts to push potential presidential candidates out of the political arena through various investigations and court cases have brought a long-standing debate in Turkey back to the fore. These developments cannot be understood merely as part of current political struggles. Rather, they should be read as the latest stages of a broader regime transformation that has been unfolding step by step over the past quarter century. Understanding what is happening today therefore requires looking beyond individual events to the political, economic, and class structures that make them possible.

The political transformation Turkey has undergone over the past quarter century has often been explained through concepts such as “authoritarianization”, “democratic backsliding”, “one-man rule”, and “competitive authoritarianism”. While these concepts are useful for describing certain aspects of this transformation, they tend to describe what the regime looks like rather than explain how it operates. Moreover, many of these concepts rely on a point of reference defined in terms of a departure from liberal democracy. Yet the issue is not a deviation from an existing—or supposedly normative—liberal democratic order. Historically, Turkey has never fully constituted a state governed by the rule of law; the authoritarian codes embedded in the state apparatus, mechanisms of repression directed against the working classes, and extralegal practices have deep historical roots in the country. The effort to understand and explain this historical continuity has itself also displayed a certain continuity, and these attempts have not been confined to liberal or mainstream political science.

Within the debates on dependency theory that developed particularly during the 1960s and 1970s, Mahir Çayan’s formulation of “new colonialism”¹ and his analysis of “covert fascism” constituted an original attempt to explain the form of the state and relations of domination in Turkey.² This article does not merely invoke this analysis as a historical reference or political legacy; it considers it a theoretical framework worth revisiting for understanding contemporary Turkey. The aim is not to mechanically apply Çayan’s theses to the present or to prove them anew, but to examine, through the AKP period, which aspects of this framework retain their explanatory power and where they require updating.

In analyzing the specific form assumed by the imperialist system in new-colonial countries, Çayan argued that repression and exploitation could be sustained not through openly fascist methods, but under conditions in which ostensibly democratic institutions continued to operate. Within this framework, law, elections, and parliamentary structures become instruments that function for as long as the conditions of class domination permit, and that can be suspended or hollowed out when necessary.³

It can be argued that this formulation still retains significant explanatory power for understanding the contemporary transformation taking place in Turkey.⁴ Today, domination in Turkey continues to be legitimized through the ostensible existence of democratic institutions and, when necessary, reinforced by instruments of coercion and repression. From this perspective, the AKP period represents not a break with the analysis of covert fascism, but a new historical conjuncture that needs to be reconsidered in its light.

This new phase, however, has certain distinctive features that set it apart from earlier periods. Foremost among them is the formation of a new, leader-centered power bloc. Extra-economic coercion exercised through the state apparatus has become a systematic means of transferring resources to groups close to the power bloc, thereby creating, through a new model of wealth accumulation, the capitalist base of a new power bloc clustered around the leader. During this period, the link between political loyalty and economic privilege has deepened to an unprecedented degree.

Second, even the judiciary’s ostensible claim to impartiality has been set aside, and the judiciary has been reduced to a direct instrument of political coercion in the hands of the power bloc. In this period, in which the judiciary has functioned as a battering ram, the security apparatus, various informal structures, and the media have also come to be used not only to suppress the opposition but also to regulate and reproduce relations within the power bloc.

Third, through the practice of appointing trustees, election results have effectively been nullified and political competition redesigned; the opposition has increasingly been shaped through repression, blackmail, and institutional intervention. In other words, institutions have not merely been instrumentalized; they have themselves been transformed.

Marxist state theory, particularly the framework developed by Nicos Poulantzas, provides important conceptual tools for understanding this transformation. For Poulantzas, the capitalist state is not simply an instrument of the ruling class, but a contradictory terrain of struggle in which class power relations are condensed. The forms assumed by the state under different historical conditions—normal or exceptional—are conjunctural expressions of these class power relations. Drawing on Poulantzas’s conceptual framework, Şebnem Oğuz’s study of the AKP period characterizes the transformation in Turkey as a process of fascistization and the regime itself as “new fascism.” It identifies the restructuring of the state’s coercive and ideological apparatuses, its increasing relative autonomy from the old power bloc, and the construction of a new power bloc as the fundamental dynamics of this process.

While drawing on this body of theoretical work, the present study takes a different point of departure. Its primary concern is to understand the transformation of the superstructure— that is, transformations in the spheres of the state, law, politics, and ideology—as a process possessing its own specific logic and relative autonomy. While relations at the level of the economic base constitute the material ground of this transformation, superstructural dynamics are treated not merely as a reflection of that base, but as a domain that must be understood in terms of its own internal workings.

Within this framework, the article argues that three parallel and mutually reinforcing processes have unfolded simultaneously in Turkey over the past quarter century: the partification of the state, the personalization of the party, and the gradual transformation of networks of interest into networks of mutual hostage-taking.⁵ (What each of these three processes entails, how it operates, and how they reinforce one another are discussed in detail in the concluding section.) Together, these three processes produce a distinctive regime logic that each of the concepts of competitive authoritarianism, neopatrimonialism, kleptocracy, and the mafia state explains only partially, but none fully captures. These concepts are not rejected here; rather, they are treated as analytical tools that support the explanatory power of the threefold thesis.

The redistribution of economic resources, the transformation of the media, the expansion of the penal system, and the hybridization of state coercion examined in the following sections can be read as manifestations of these three processes across different domains. These sections, however, do not merely offer a descriptive catalogue; through each domain, they seek to address the question of how the state is transformed into a mechanism for the reproduction of a particular power bloc.

The central question posed by this study, then, is the following: In accordance with which class and political interests are state institutions being restructured, and through what mechanisms is this restructuring sustained?

Extra-Economic Coercion and the Capitalist Base of the Power Bloc

The relationship between the capitalist state and the economy has never consisted merely of neutral regulation. The state operates within economic relations not as a neutral arbiter, but as a structural force that ensures the reproduction of particular class interests. Under the normal functioning of the capitalist state, however, this partiality operates largely through indirect mechanisms—legal regulations, market rules, and institutional frameworks. While the state serves to reconcile the conflicting interests of different fractions of capital within a common framework of accumulation, it also ensures that this accommodation does not exceed certain limits.

The transformation Turkey has undergone over the past quarter century has fundamentally altered this relationship. Rather than regulating capital accumulation, the state has begun to produce it itself; resources transferred to particular fractions of capital through extra-economic coercion have provided the material basis for a new power bloc. It is here that the concept of extra-economic coercion becomes particularly important, referring to intervention in the process of accumulation outside market mechanisms, through the direct exercise of political power and the state apparatus. Public tenders, privatizations, zoning regulations, urgent expropriations, mechanisms of seizure, and the allocation of credit by public banks have become instruments of a model of accumulation in which political proximity, rather than market competition, is decisive. This model has become particularly pronounced in sectors characterized by intensive state intervention, such as construction, energy, transport infrastructure, healthcare, and the defense industry.

The outcome of this process is not simply the enrichment of particular companies. The structure that has emerged points to a deeper transformation: the balance of power between Turkey’s established capital groups and the new fractions of capital that rose during the AKP period has been reshaped. In the early years of the AKP, this transformation was often interpreted in terms of a shift in power between the traditional big capital associated with TÜSİAD and the new fractions of capital organized around MÜSİAD, sometimes referred to as “Anatolian capital.” Over time, however, the process moved beyond this framework. Particularly from the mid-2010s onward, new capital groups that expanded through state tenders, privatizations, public banks, and various incentive mechanisms came to be defined not simply by their conservative or Islamist identities, but also by their organic ties to the power bloc. As crystallized in the public debate around the so-called “Gang of Five” (Beşli Çete), the emerging structure signifies not merely the rise of new fractions of capital, but the formation, through state resources, of a new capitalist base tied to the power bloc. The transformation should therefore be understood not simply as a process of economic redistribution, but as a restructuring of the balance of power among fractions of capital. Throughout the AKP period, the state has served as the principal mechanism facilitating and deepening this restructuring.

One of the least discussed yet most structural dimensions of this transformation is the increasing concentration of political and economic power in the same hands. Such structures generally exhibit the following pattern: as control over the state apparatus deepens, the narrow circle at the apex of the power bloc also gains broader access to economic domains. This circle systematically occupies economic spheres that generate rents and profits. Conducted through commission arrangements, partnership structures, and proxy individuals and entities, this process places individual members of the family in the position of behind-the-scenes managers of particular sectors of the economy. The transfer of wealth carried out through the state apparatus thus not only sustains a broad power bloc; it also reproduces a model of accumulation increasingly concentrated in the person of the leader and his family. This requires us to understand the restructuring of the class composition of the power bloc not simply as the replacement of one fraction of capital by another, but as a distinctive form of domination in which political and economic power are concentrated in the same hands.⁶

The transformation in question is sometimes described in the literature through concepts such as “kleptocracy” or “crony capitalism.” Although these concepts have some utility in describing the corruption of distributive relations, their explanatory power is limited. Above all, they rely on a liberal point of reference by construing what is taking place as a deviation from the normal functioning of the market. Yet the structure that has emerged in Turkey is not a deviation, but a reorganization of class power relations under a specific conjuncture. Moreover, the concept of kleptocracy foregrounds individual corruption and rent-seeking relations, thereby obscuring the structural dimension. What is at stake here is not a handful of individuals looting the state treasury, but the transformation of the state apparatus into a mechanism that facilitates capital accumulation for a particular power bloc.

Another important dimension of this transformation is the articulation of relations of economic dependence with the reproduction of political loyalty and, over time, their development beyond this into networks of mutual hostage-taking. The workings of this structure are examined in the following section.

As a result, the transformation of the economic sphere in Turkey entails the transformation of the state into an apparatus that secures both the capital accumulation and the political reproduction of a particular power bloc. Explaining this transformation solely through concepts such as corruption or favoritism obscures its structural dimension. What is at stake is not a deviation from the normal functioning of the capitalist state, but a specific conjuncture in which class power relations are reorganized in a distinctive manner and the state apparatus serves as the principal mechanism of this reorganization.

Impunity, Shared Risk, and the Internal Contradictions of the Power Bloc

The question of how power blocs are held together has long been a recurring concern of political analysis. Classical approaches address this question through three fundamental dynamics: ideological hegemony, the distribution of economic interests, and direct coercion. These dynamics, however, are often treated as mechanisms independent of one another. The structure that has emerged in Turkey over the past quarter century offers a distinctive example of how these three dynamics become intertwined and transform one another.

It is clear that what holds together the different components of the power bloc—fractions of capital, bureaucratic cliques, political parties, religious networks, and paramilitary structures—is not simply ideological commitment. A significant proportion of the actors clustered around AKP rule hold different, at times contradictory, worldviews. Between the MHP and religious community networks, between construction capital and defense-industry circles, and between local bureaucratic cliques and international financial groups, what exists is not a shared ideological program but a shared political conjuncture.

The distribution of economic interests takes us further in explaining this cohesion. As discussed in the previous section, transfers of resources carried out through the state apparatus have reconstructed the capitalist base of the power bloc. Public tenders, privatizations, the allocation of credit by public banks, and various mechanisms of rent distribution have bound different actors to a common terrain of accumulation. Yet the sharing of economic interests is not sufficient on its own. Interests can change; when conditions permit, capital can forge new alliances and break with old ones.

In the Turkish case, the structure that has emerged over time contains a dimension that eliminates this flexibility. At its foundation lies the increasing reliance of the accumulation process on mechanisms operating outside the law or at its margins. Seizures carried out through extra-economic coercion, non-competitive tendering practices, informal financial transfers, and wealth accumulation fostered under the protection of the judiciary all share a common feature: the legal and political consequences that would arise if these relations were subjected to scrutiny bind the actors tightly to the continuity of the system.

This creates a distinctive contradiction within the internal dynamics of the power bloc. As Poulantzas emphasizes, in exceptional forms of the state, contradictions within the power bloc deepen not between apparatuses but within each apparatus itself. In Turkey, struggles over distribution among bureaucratic cliques, fractions of capital, and political actors have intensified over time and become increasingly overt. Yet these internal contradictions do not dissolve the system; on the contrary, they perform a function that sustains it. This is because the actors are compelled to remain together not only for the sake of future gains, but also in order to protect against shared risks accumulated in the past.

It is precisely at this point that the concept of networks of mutual hostage-taking acquires its meaning. In ordinary networks of interest, actors can leave when circumstances change; once the prospect of shared gain disappears, the alliance may also dissolve. In networks of mutual hostage-taking, however, the cost of exit becomes increasingly unbearable, giving rise to a negative bond. This is because each actor’s past is held by the others as potential leverage. Tendering processes, relations of judicial protection, practices of impunity, and informal financial ties gradually weave a network of mutual vulnerability among the actors.

The class dimension of this structure cannot be overlooked either. Relations of mutual hostage-taking are woven across a broad terrain, extending not only between large capital groups and political power, but from the middle ranks of the bureaucracy to local tender networks, and from media proprietors to members of the judiciary. The material basis of the regime thus rests not merely on a narrow circle at the top, but on an extensive network linking different class segments and fractions to one another. The breadth of this network provides the regime with a significant degree of stability, while at the same time containing its most fundamental contradiction: the wider the network becomes, the more intense the struggle over distribution among the actors within it.

Consequently, what holds the power bloc together in Turkey cannot be explained through any single dynamic such as ideology, interest, or coercion. What is decisive is how these three dynamics are articulated around mechanisms of impunity. The continuity of the regime now draws not only on the rents it distributes, but also on the reckoning that would follow its unraveling—on a negative bond, on networks of mutual hostage-taking. This also provides a key explanation for why the internal contradictions of the power bloc, rather than dissolving the regime, reproduce it in different forms.

The Reorganization of the Political Field: Hegemony, Coercion, and Co-optation

The political field is not merely a terrain upon which class struggles are reflected; it is a terrain in which they are actively shaped. As Poulantzas emphasizes, the state is not a neutral structure that regulates the political field; rather, it is a terrain that assumes the function of safeguarding the long-term interests of the ruling class while performing this function by internalizing, in contradictory ways, the relations among different class forces. From this perspective, the struggle to determine the conditions of political competition should be understood not merely as a tactical contest between the governing party and the opposition, but as a structural conflict over whose hegemony is to be organized and in accordance with which class interests.

The transformation of the political field in Turkey over the past quarter century reveals a striking pattern when viewed from this perspective. Political competition has not been eliminated altogether: elections continue to be held, opposition parties retain their legal existence, and the parliamentary arena continues to function. Yet this visible continuity conceals the profound restructuring that the political field has undergone. The issue is not merely that the conditions of competition have become more unequal. At a deeper level, the boundaries, actors, and rules of operation of the political field are being redefined in accordance with the needs of the power bloc.

This redefinition operates through two fundamental mechanisms: coercion and co-optation. These mechanisms function not as alternatives to one another, but as complementary instruments that also define each other’s limits.

The mechanisms of coercion manifest themselves most clearly in the political instrumentalization of the judiciary. In this context, the cases of Osman Kavala, Selahattin Demirtaş, Ekrem İmamoğlu, and Can Atalay cannot be regarded merely as individual prosecutions. Each represents the criminalization of a social force that constitutes a different category of threat from the perspective of the power bloc. Kavala symbolizes the potential for uncontrolled mass mobilization—the cross-class space of encounter created by Gezi. Demirtaş is a figure who transformed the class-based and national demands of the Kurdish political movement into electoral success and sought to “make it a party of Turkey” (Türkiyelileştirmek); he represents a direct challenge to the hegemonic project of the power bloc. İmamoğlu, meanwhile, embodies both the possibility that the economic and political networks of the power bloc can be dismantled at the local level through elections and the prospect that those in power can be electorally defeated. What these three figures share is not simply that they are opposition figures, but that they represent a capacity to threaten the mechanisms through which the power bloc reproduces itself.

Within this framework, the case of Can Atalay carries a distinct significance. Having served as a lawyer in numerous cases concerning workplace deaths, most notably the Soma mine disaster, Atalay became a symbol of labor struggles; despite a ruling by the Constitutional Court, he has been held in prison without his status as a member of parliament being recognized. This case occupies a distinctive place insofar as it demonstrates that mechanisms of coercion directly target not only political opposition but also the political representation of labor struggles.

The practice of appointing trustees represents the manifestation of the same logic in the sphere of local government. The invalidation of election results through judicial and administrative mechanisms should be understood not merely as an infringement of the will of the electorate, but also as a means of preserving the power bloc’s local networks of economic rent and its bureaucratic structures. Indeed, the tendering arrangements, allocation of budgets, and changes in personnel following trustee appointments clearly demonstrate that, while politically driven, these practices also perform concrete economic functions. Over time, the logic of this practice has extended beyond local government. The trustee mechanism first targeted municipalities won by the Kurdish political movement and, together with party closures, sought effectively to render the movement’s electoral representation inoperative. It subsequently spread to metropolitan municipalities in western Turkey and, most recently, through a court ruling declaring the party congress null and void and the appointment of a trustee targeting the central leadership of the main opposition party, became an instrument directed at the very capacity for institutional opposition. This three-stage expansion demonstrates that mechanisms of coercion have come to target not merely a particular political movement, but the redesign of political competition as a whole.

The process of co-optation operating simultaneously with these mechanisms of coercion constitutes a less visible but equally decisive dimension of the reorganization of the political field. The incorporation of actors from different political traditions into the orbit of the power bloc through offices, resources, and alliance relations demonstrates that hegemony operates not only through repression but also through the production of consent. The consent at issue here, however, does not correspond to a hegemonic project encompassing broad sections of society in the Gramscian sense; rather, it takes the form of a practice of co-optation directed at political actors incorporated within the boundaries of the power bloc. The incorporation of the MHP into the power bloc through the People’s Alliance constitutes the clearest example of this process: a form of co-optation that simultaneously serves to bind the nationalist constituency to the system, strengthen the security apparatus, and prevent the emergence of a potential nationalist alternative from within the opposition.

The combined operation of these two mechanisms—coercion and co-optation—produces a dynamic process that continuously reorganizes the political field. What matters here is that this process transforms not only individual actors but also forms of political organization. Opposition parties face increasing judicial and administrative pressure on their internal balances and organizational structures. This pressure directly affects the opposition’s political agenda, leadership structure, and relationship with its social base.

Consequently, the reorganization of the political field in Turkey cannot be explained solely by the increasingly unequal conditions of electoral competition. At a more fundamental level, what is at stake is the power bloc’s determination of the conditions under which hegemony is reproduced—who may participate in politics, which demands are considered legitimate, and which social forces are admitted into the political field. This process of determination is carried out through the combined operation of coercion and co-optation, while the judiciary, administrative mechanisms, and systems of economic incentives are transformed into instruments of this process.

The Expansion of the Coercive Apparatus: Punishment, Isolation, and the Suppression of Class Struggle

The coercive apparatuses of the capitalist state never operate in the name of an abstract “public order.” Prisons, the judicial system, and penal policies have historically played a decisive role in disciplining the working classes, oppressed national communities, and oppositional social movements. To interpret the transformation of the penal system in Turkey merely as a technique of governance, detached from this historical context, creates a critical blind spot in the analysis of the regime.

Historically, the coercive apparatuses of the state in Turkey have been organized along two principal axes. The first is the suppression of labor movements and left-wing organizations. This function, which became increasingly pronounced toward the end of the 1970s and was institutionalized by the military coup of 12 September 1980, defined one of the primary targets of the penal system for decades. The coup had a lasting destructive impact on the labor movement: real wages fell dramatically throughout the 1980s, while its organizational capacity was effectively broken. The labor movement was able to revive in the 1990s—the Spring Actions of 1989 and the struggles that followed were concrete expressions of this revival—but during the AKP period it encountered a new process of dismantling through legal and institutional mechanisms. Here, the function of the coercive apparatus took the form not so much of direct physical repression as of reconstructing the legal framework in ways that made labor organizing increasingly difficult. At the same time, bans on strikes, restrictions on the collective bargaining rights of public-sector workers, and the obstruction of trade-union activity through various channels demonstrate how permeable the boundary between coercion and law has become.

The second axis is the suppression of the Kurdish national movement. This function, which reached its peak under the state of emergency regime implemented in southeastern Turkey particularly during the 1990s, turned detention facilities, extrajudicial executions, and forced displacement into routine instruments of governance. The expansion of the penal system during the AKP period has drawn on the continuity of these two historical axes, while at the same time carrying both to a qualitatively new level.⁷

The most concrete indicator of this qualitative leap is the extraordinary increase in the prison population. The number of prisoners, which stood at around fifty thousand in the early 2000s, has today exceeded four hundred thousand. The dynamics underlying this figure are multidimensional. On the one hand, there is the criminalization of political opposition, the Kurdish political movement, and social protest; on the other, prisons are increasingly being transformed into reservoirs of cheap and precarious labor. This second dimension is particularly significant: the penal system serves not only a repressive but also an exploitative function, as prison labor is articulated into capital accumulation. The prison thus becomes part not only of the coercive apparatus but also of the regime of accumulation.

The transformation of prison architecture also acquires a different meaning when viewed from this perspective. The trajectory from F-Type prisons to S- and Y-Type high-security institutions does not represent merely a technical expansion of capacity. It reflects a deliberate architectural and administrative choice aimed at making isolation increasingly systematic and institutionalized and at eliminating prisoners’ capacity for collective organization. The death fasts that followed the transition to F-Type prisons and state intervention during this process demonstrated that this choice did not come without a cost. Nevertheless, the model of isolation was persistently maintained and deepened.

The perspective developed by Foucault in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison provides important tools for understanding this transformation: penal institutions do not merely punish offenders; they also socialize techniques of subjection. Yet this perspective remains incomplete if considered independently of class power relations. The expansion of the penal system in Turkey is not simply a general practice of “disciplining”; it is an intervention aimed at neutralizing particular social forces—the working classes, the Kurdish political movement, left-wing organizations, and the democratic opposition. The boundaries of this intervention, however, are not fixed. The definition of the enemy can expand according to the conjunctural needs of the power bloc; rather than remaining limited to rivals and opponents, it can be stretched to encompass anyone who stands in its way, cannot be controlled, or is not sufficiently dependent. This flexibility is not an arbitrary feature but a structural element of the regime’s logic of operation: the unpredictability of who may be designated an enemy pre-empts potential opposition and deepens compliance.

The clearest expression of this orientation toward neutralizing opposition and deepening compliance is the transformation of pretrial detention into a mechanism of punishment. The deliberate prolongation of legal proceedings, detention lasting for years, and the professional, social, and economic devastation experienced during this period function as de facto punishment without awaiting a conviction. Kavala’s years-long detention and Demirtaş’s continued imprisonment despite judgments of the European Court of Human Rights most clearly reveal the political dimension of this mechanism.

The broader social diffusion of the threat of punishment should also be understood within this framework. A journalist’s report, an academic’s public statement, a trade-union official’s action, a student’s protest, a satirical cartoon in a humor magazine, or a citizen’s harsh criticism of Erdoğan—the fact that all of these can become subjects of criminal investigation produces an effect aimed not merely at individuals, but at eliminating the very terrain on which social opposition can organize. The threat of imprisonment performs this function even without being carried out: individuals who calculate the possible consequences withdraw from political activity, public expression, and organized struggle.

Consequently, the expansion of the penal system and the transformation of prison architecture in Turkey demonstrate how the regime has reorganized its coercive apparatus toward the suppression of class struggle. While this transformation displays historical continuity, it also represents a qualitative leap: practices associated with the state of emergency, previously largely confined to regions with dense Kurdish populations and to particular periods—especially the conditions of the “internal war” of the 1990s—have now become mechanisms operating across the country within the ordinary legal framework. The state of emergency regime imposed on the Kurdish population functioned as a kind of laboratory; methods and practices developed there gradually became part of a mode of governance directed at society as a whole. The coercive apparatus has expanded, deepened, and become normalized.

The Reorganization of Ideological Apparatuses: Media, Hegemony, and the Limits of Consent

No relation of domination can be sustained through coercion alone. Gramsci’s concept of hegemony theorizes precisely this reality: the ruling class consolidates its domination not only through the coercive apparatuses of the state, but also by securing the acceptance of its worldview among broad sections of society and transforming it into “common sense”. Ideological apparatuses—education, religion, the media, and the family—constitute the principal mechanisms through which this consent is produced. Yet, as Gramsci emphasizes, hegemony is never a completed or contradiction-free process; it must continually be reconstructed, defended against counter-hegemonic forces, and, when necessary, reinforced by coercion.

The transformation of the media sphere in Turkey, viewed from this perspective, goes beyond a simple narrative of “censorship” or “repression” and appears instead as one dimension of the reorganization of ideological apparatuses in accordance with the hegemonic project of the power bloc. What is distinctive about this reorganization is that it has taken place less through direct state intervention than through the redistribution of media ownership in favor of groups aligned with the capitalist base of the power bloc. Media ownership underwent a fundamental transformation during the AKP period. Traditional media groups with organic ties to big capital centered around TÜSİAD were increasingly replaced by groups identified with the capitalist base of the power bloc. Instruments of the state apparatus—mechanisms of seizure and sale through the Savings Deposit Insurance Fund (TMSF), the distribution of advertising, tax pressure, advantages in public tenders, and loans extended by public banks—played a decisive role in this transfer of ownership. The transformation of media ownership thus functioned as the manifestation, within the sphere of ideological apparatuses, of the mechanism of extra-economic coercion discussed earlier.

The result has been the transformation of the media into an ideological apparatus of the power bloc. Yet this transformation has not produced a uniform structure. While much of the mainstream media reproduces the hegemonic framework of the power bloc, oppositional media have continued to exist through small-scale digital outlets, independent journalists, and some media organizations struggling to sustain themselves through their own resources. These media outlets and channels are themselves subjected to various forms of pressure. Judicial proceedings, economic siege, advertising bans, and physical violence constitute the instruments of this pressure. The media sphere has thus become divided between a domain in which the ideological hegemony of the power bloc is reproduced and another in which the struggle against that hegemony continues. The cost of operating in this second domain has grown increasingly severe.

Physical violence against journalists has a long history in Turkey—the killing of numerous journalists, most notably Uğur Mumcu, constitutes some of the gravest episodes in this history. In recent years, however, the forms of violence have changed: assaults carried out in public, shooting attacks, waves of detention and arrest, systematic campaigns of intimidation, and online harassment campaigns have effectively turned oppositional journalism into a dangerous activity. When judicial proceedings and economic siege are added to this picture, independent journalism becomes not merely a professional but an existential field of risk. The relationship between historical continuity and the present intensification demonstrates that pressure on the media is structural rather than merely conjunctural.

Within this dual structure, the production of consent cannot be reduced to a simple model of propaganda. Which voices are heard, which conflicts are made visible, which social groups are recognized as legitimate representatives, and which demands are excluded from the political field are shaped to a large extent through the media sphere. The Kurdish question, labor struggles, gender-based violence, and environmental issues—the social conflicts within these fields are either rendered invisible in the mainstream media or reframed in ways consistent with the hegemonic framework of the power bloc.

The function of self-censorship in this process is particularly noteworthy. Direct censorship prevents only particular forms of content; self-censorship, by contrast, silences a much broader field by inducing journalists and media workers to internalize possible boundaries. This mechanism marks the point at which the boundary between coercion and consent becomes most blurred: actors produce their own constraints without being directly subjected to repression.

Consequently, the transformation of the media sphere in Turkey forms part of the reorganization of ideological apparatuses in accordance with the hegemonic project of the power bloc. This transformation should be understood not simply as a question of press freedom, but as a question of how consent is produced, which social forces are excluded from this process of production, and within what limits hegemony operates.

The Ideological Cement of the Hegemonic Project: Religion, Identity, and Social Reproduction

The hegemony of the ruling class is constructed not only in the economic and political spheres, but throughout the processes of social reproduction. Hegemony requires the adoption by broad sections of society of a particular worldview, system of values, and framework of identity. The interventions of the power bloc in the spheres of education, religion, family, and cultural identity are therefore not merely contingent policy choices; they represent a structural effort to continually reconstruct the ideological foundations of the hegemonic project.

In Turkey during the AKP period, this foundation has been constructed around a flexible and mutable conservative-Islamist ideology. This ideological framework is not fixed; it can change form according to the needs of alliances and the conjuncture. While the discourse of “one state, one nation, one flag, one religion” points toward a nationalist-Islamist orientation, the initiatives undertaken during the peace process, including measures such as removing the word “Turkish” from the names of state institutions, placed a different framework alongside this discourse. Ottomanist nostalgia has at times taken precedence over narrow nationalism, while Islamism has functioned both as an instrument of Sunni-conservative domestic politics and as a foreign-policy discourse articulating claims to regional power.

Yet behind this flexibility lies a consistent function. Whatever form it assumes, this ideological framework has continuously served to reframe class contradictions along national, religious, or identity-based lines and to divert the demands of working people away from class-based organization. This functional continuity has roots extending back to the ideological environment based on the Turkish-Islamic synthesis created by the military coup of 12 September 1980.

The role of the Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı) in this process is particularly noteworthy. With the rapid expansion of its budget and personnel, the extension of religious services beyond mosques, its institutional interventions ranging from education to healthcare, and its activities abroad, the Diyanet has, as Oğuz also emphasizes, become a prominent institution among the ideological apparatuses of the state. This transformation does not represent merely an expansion of religious activity; it forms part of the reorganization of the state’s ideological apparatuses in accordance with the hegemonic project of the power bloc.

The transformation of education should also be understood within this framework. Changes to the curriculum, the proliferation of imam-hatip schools, and increasing pressure on the university environment cannot be read merely as shifts in education policy. They are structural choices that determine what forms of knowledge are considered legitimate, which social groups can gain access to higher education, and within which ideological framework future generations will be shaped. Complemented by the coercive apparatus, this ideological intervention—particularly when considered in light of the academic purges that followed the attempted coup of 15 July—has transformed universities into hybrid structures performing both ideological and coercive functions.

Migration presents a different but equally important dimension. Turkey’s hosting of millions of Syrian refugees and migrants is, first and foremost, a humanitarian and political reality, the product of millions of people fleeing conditions of war and poverty. Yet this reality has also produced a multilayered field in which different actors intervene in pursuit of different interests. From the perspective of the labor market, refugee labor employed under informal and precarious conditions creates the conditions for suppressing labor costs and weakening labor organization—this is not a product of the refugees themselves, but of the capital that employs them under such conditions and of state policies that tolerate these conditions. Politically, meanwhile, migration has been transformed by the power bloc into a functional instrument in both domestic and foreign policy: a bargaining chip in relations with the EU and, in domestic politics, a terrain on which nationalist and security-oriented discourse is reproduced. Migration policy has thus become a multifunctional field serving both the economic and ideological interests of the power bloc, independently of the objective conditions facing refugees.

Yet if the ideological dimension of the hegemonic project is considered in isolation, the question of how the AKP was able to rely on such a broad social base for more than two decades remains unanswered. Ümit Akçay’s analysis of neoliberal populism makes a crucial contribution at this point: the ideological hegemony of the power bloc was constructed not only through frameworks of meaning organized around religion, nationalism, and identity, but also through concrete mechanisms of material compensation. On the one hand, the organizational power of the working class was systematically weakened through the establishment of an authoritarian labor regime, privatization, and the flexibilization of the labor market; on the other, a new partial welfare regime was introduced to mitigate the destructive effects generated by this process. The expansion of the Green Card program, General Health Insurance, and the Conditional Cash Transfer system incorporated into the system the poorest sections of society that had previously lacked social protection, providing a material basis for their attachment to the governing party.

Mechanisms of financial inclusion were added to this. In an environment in which real wages did not increase significantly, the incorporation of broad sections of society—particularly the poorest—into the financial system through consumer credit and housing finance generated a short-term welfare effect; at the same time, it made these groups dependent on economic stability and, consequently, on the government. In this sense, the indebtedness of the poor functioned both as a mechanism of compensation and as an instrument of political discipline.

While the ideological foundations of the hegemonic project were being constructed in this way, one of its material conditions was the systematic dismantling of the labor movement. Having suffered a severe blow under the 1980 military coup, the labor movement was able to revive during the 1990s; this revival constituted one of the principal dynamics that made it more difficult for the political class of the period to implement IMF programs. During the AKP period, however, the labor market was fundamentally restructured through the new Labor Law that entered into force in 2003; part-time employment, subcontracting, and subcontractual relations became increasingly widespread. The consequences were devastating: the unionization rate, which stood at twenty-nine percent in 2001, had fallen to around six percent by 2015. Precariousness, long working hours, structurally high unemployment, and low real wages became enduring features of this process.

As Akçay emphasizes, the foundations of the “authoritarian labor regime” were laid precisely during the AKP’s early period, when it was perceived as a democratizing force. The atomization of labor organization in this manner weakened the agenda-setting power of class-based politics and shifted social conflict from a vertical axis—the struggle between labor and capital—to horizontal axes, that is, struggles within the ruling class. This shift constitutes one of the structural conditions that enabled the AKP to remain in power for more than two decades.

What connects all these spheres is the class content of the hegemonic project. The ideological framework constructed around religion, family, nationalism, and security obscures and disregards class-based social conflicts, while serving to reorganize oppressed groups around different axes of identity and loyalty and to identify the material interests of the power bloc with “national” and “religious” values. Nor can it be denied that this ideological framework has found genuine resonance among broad sections of society—the effectiveness of hegemony derives precisely from this genuine resonance.

Yet the limits of this hegemony are becoming increasingly apparent. The deepening economic crisis, growing social inequalities, and the spread of precarity in everyday life are bringing to the surface the widening contradiction between the ideological framework and material reality. The government’s increasing reliance on mechanisms of coercion to contain this contradiction is also an indication of the weakening of its capacity to produce consent.

Hegemonic Crises and the Responses of the Power Bloc

Hegemonic projects never advance without contradiction or interruption. Tensions among social forces, economic crises, political opposition, and unexpected conjunctural ruptures periodically unsettle the hegemonic equilibrium. Such moments of crisis provide a privileged analytical vantage point, insofar as they reveal relations of power and the actual priorities of the power bloc that remain obscured under ordinary conditions. In Poulantzas’s terms, exceptional forms of the state are the products of precisely such hegemonic crises: the deeper the crisis becomes, the more pronounced the simultaneous mobilization of the coercive and ideological dimensions of the state apparatus.

Viewed from this perspective, Turkey’s experience over the past quarter century reveals a consistent pattern in the successive moments of hegemonic crisis and in the responses of the power bloc to these crises.

The Gezi Park protests constitute the first major rupture in this pattern. Beginning in May 2013 and rapidly spreading across the country, the movement went far beyond an environmental protest. The convergence on common ground of groups from different class positions, political traditions, and identity groups revealed the existence of a broad social energy outside the hegemonic framework of the power bloc. The enduring threat that Gezi posed from the perspective of the power bloc lies precisely here: the movement challenged the hegemonic project of the power bloc not only through its immediate political demands, but also through its capacity for uncontrolled cross-class mobilization. The fact that the Kavala case remained on the political agenda for years and that Gezi was reframed as an “attempt to overthrow the government” demonstrates that efforts were made not only to suppress this mobilization in practice, but also to neutralize it historically and ideologically.⁸

The elections of 7 June 2015 constitute the second major moment of hegemonic rupture. The HDP’s crossing of the ten-percent electoral threshold and the governing party’s loss of its parliamentary majority were not merely electoral outcomes. Behind the success of the Kurdish political movement in these elections lay not only its Kurdish electoral base, but also the broader ground for alliance constructed around the discourse of “becoming a party of Turkey” (Türkiyelileşme). By opening the national and class-based demands of the Kurdish political movement to all oppressed and excluded sections of Turkish society, this discourse directly challenged the power bloc’s strategy of keeping the Kurdish question within a security-oriented framework and presenting its hegemonic project organized around political Islam as the sole alternative.

In other words, the threat arose not only from the transformation of Kurdish political demands into electoral success, but from the fact that this success heralded an alternative political discourse capable of bringing together different class and identity groups. The wave of violence between the elections of 7 June and 1 November and the intensification of security-oriented discourse formed part of the response to this hegemonic rupture.

Demirtaş’s symbolic significance should also be understood within this framework: he was not merely an opposition politician, but a figure demonstrating the possibility of a politics that combined class and identity axes outside the security-oriented and nationalist hegemonic framework of the power bloc. His prolonged imprisonment is the price of that possibility.

The attempted coup of 15 July, meanwhile, constituted both a moment of hegemonic crisis and a conjuncture that was turned into an opportunity to overcome that crisis. The coup attempt itself marked the culmination of contradictions within the power bloc—the struggle between the AKP and the Gülen community over the distribution of resources and political power. Yet the failure of the attempt created an extraordinary opportunity for the restructuring of the power bloc. The mass purges carried out under the state of emergency and the regime of decree-laws targeted not only Gülenist cadres; left-wing organizations, the Kurdish political movement, independent academics, and oppositional media organizations were among those most severely affected by the process. The conjuncture created by the coup attempt thus provided the conditions for the power bloc to consolidate its own capitalist base, expand its control over staffing within the state apparatus, and transform extraordinary powers into permanent mechanisms.

Viewed through Mahir Çayan’s framework of covert fascism, this process provides a concrete example of how the power bloc can preserve the form of representative democracy while transforming extraordinary powers into permanent instruments—that is, how covert fascism can temporarily resort to openly fascist methods.⁹

The 2019 Istanbul elections also occupy a distinctive place within this pattern. İmamoğlu’s electoral victory constituted a rupture that threatened the power bloc’s economic and political networks in Istanbul. Istanbul is not only Turkey’s largest city; it is also a major site in which some of the power bloc’s most extensive mechanisms of economic rent operate. Losing Istanbul therefore meant not merely a political defeat, but also the weakening of local rent networks that sustain the capitalist base of the power bloc. The response to this rupture was both swift and multilayered: the annulment and rerunning of the election, the judicial proceedings that followed, and ultimately imprisonment constituted concrete stages of this response.

These interventions against İmamoğlu cannot be understood simply as the criminalization of an individual politician. Each step expresses the power bloc’s drive to protect its mechanisms of reproduction at the local level and to pre-empt the emergence of an alternative center of political power. The scale of the government’s fear reveals itself in the disproportionality of its response.

Recent interventions targeting the CHP leadership indicate that the hegemonic crisis has acquired a new dimension. Beyond individual politicians and local governments, the targeting of the very capacity for institutional opposition demonstrates that the power bloc is attempting to manage its hegemonic crisis not only through coercive apparatuses, but also by intervening in the organizational structure of the political field itself.

Taken together, these moments of rupture reveal a consistent pattern: whenever the hegemonic equilibrium has been threatened, the power bloc has simultaneously deployed legal, administrative, security, and economic instruments. The consistency and scope of these responses indicate that such interventions are not momentary reactions, but necessary outcomes of the logic through which the power bloc reproduces itself. Yet behind this pattern lies an increasingly profound crisis of governing. As its capacity to produce consent weakens and its social base narrows, the power bloc is compelled to resort to coercive apparatuses with increasing frequency and on an expanding scale.

Viewed through Gramsci’s framework, this signifies a retreat of the consensual dimension of hegemony and the growing predominance of its coercive dimension. The most striking indication of this retreat is that coercive apparatuses are now used not only to suppress social opposition, but also to intervene directly in the internal structures of rival parties, shape their leaderships, and neutralize electoral alternatives in advance. The political field is thereby transformed from merely an arena of unequal competition into a field actively designed and managed by the power bloc.

The Hybridization of State Coercion: The Interpenetration of Formal and Informal Repertoires of Coercion

The coercive apparatus of the capitalist state has never consisted solely of the military, the police, and the judiciary. Historically, particularly during periods of intensified class struggle, states have relied not only on formal coercive apparatuses but also on informal networks of force and organized crime groups. This relationship is not merely a matter of corruption or institutional deviation; it performs a structural function by allowing tasks that would carry political costs if undertaken directly by the formal state apparatus—intimidating the opposition, deterring social movements, and exercising extra-economic coercion through deniable channels—to be carried out through such networks.

In Turkey, the roots of this relationship extend back to the Cold War period, to the Tactical Mobilization Group (Seferberlik Tetkik Kurulu) and the Special Warfare Department (Özel Harp Dairesi). Organized as part of NATO’s “stay-behind” networks, these structures established organic ties with criminal organizations, ultranationalist militias, and various paramilitary elements in the name of the struggle against communism. The concrete function of these ties became clearly visible amid the political violence of the late 1970s. The 1996 Susurluk crash, meanwhile, suddenly brought the relationship among the state, politics, and organized crime into sharp relief; the findings of the Kutlu Savaş Report documented that this relationship was not the product of individual deviations, but of a structural state practice.

This historical continuity persisted during the AKP period, albeit in transformed form. What distinguishes this period, however, is not simply the continuation of the counter-guerrilla logic of the Cold War, but the emergence of a hybrid structure in which formal and informal repertoires of coercion have become increasingly intertwined. Formal mechanisms such as the judiciary, police, and intelligence services; informal actors such as mafia and organized-crime networks; and techniques of coercion such as blackmail, media smear campaigns, troll networks, and economic siege now operate not as alternatives to one another, but as mutually complementary components of the same political mode of operation. The defining feature of this repertoire is not armed organization as such, but its capacity to generate a diversity of coercive practices that the state can disavow when necessary, claim as its own when expedient, and reshape according to the conjuncture. The issue, therefore, is not the particular actors involved, but the political functions they perform.

This hybrid repertoire of coercion becomes more visible when Fraenkel’s analysis of the dual state is applied to contemporary Turkey. In spheres where the boundaries of the normative state are suspended, the prerogative state operates not only through formal institutions but, when necessary, through informal instruments of coercion as well. The deliberate climate of impunity produced by the state in order to render such informal coercion functional can be seen concretely in the ability of organized-crime figures to openly threaten opposition journalists and politicians without these threats producing judicial consequences.

For this reason, it is insufficient to describe the transformation experienced during the AKP period simply as the strengthening of paramilitary structures. It is more accurate to speak of the emergence of a hybrid architecture of coercion in which the state’s formal and informal repertoires of coercion have become increasingly intertwined. Threats, blackmail, and the political instrumentalization of personal dossiers should also be understood within this framework: these are not products of individual moral failings, but of the power bloc’s logic of neutralizing the opposition and disciplining actors within its own ranks. As discussed in the section on networks of mutual hostage-taking, these mechanisms also function as an adhesive that maintains the internal cohesion of the power bloc.

This hybrid architecture of coercion has become one of the fundamental mechanisms that enable and secure the partification of the state, the personalization of the party, and the continuity of networks of mutual hostage-taking.

The Critique of Existing Frameworks and the Theoretical Position of the Threefold Thesis

The examples examined in this study demonstrate that the transformation Turkey has undergone over the past quarter century cannot be explained solely through concepts of institutional deterioration or democratic backsliding. The instrumentalization of law, the class-based redistribution of economic resources, the reorganization of political competition, the transformation of ideological apparatuses, the expansion of the coercive apparatus, and the incorporation of informal networks of force into the operation of the state—when all these processes are considered together, what emerges is not a picture in which particular institutions have simply malfunctioned, but a more fundamental transformation in which the class function of the state itself has been reshaped.

Each of the existing frameworks employed to conceptualize this transformation has certain limitations.

The competitive authoritarianism approach is useful for describing regimes in which elections continue to be held while the conditions of competition become increasingly unequal. The analyses of Turkey by Esen, Gümüşçü, and Yavuzyılmaz successfully identify the concrete indicators of this framework. Its principal limitation, however, is that it relies on a point of reference that takes liberal democracy as the norm. In the Turkish case, the issue is not a deviation from a democratic order as it ought to exist, but the reorganization of particular class power relations within a specific conjuncture. Moreover, the concept of competitive authoritarianism tends to obscure the class foundations of political processes and the transformation of the state’s economic function.

The concept of neopatrimonialism possesses a certain explanatory power in describing how networks of personal loyalty come to determine institutional functioning. Yet this concept also carries a historical limitation: rooted in the tradition of modernization theory, it tends to reproduce the dichotomy between the “traditional” and the “modern.” The transformation taking place in Turkey is not a matter of traditional patrimonial relations deforming modern institutions; rather, it is the capitalist state assuming a specific form within a particular historical conjuncture.

The concept of kleptocracy is useful for describing the transfer of economic rents to particular groups. Yet this concept likewise frames what is taking place as a deviation from the norm of the free market and thus relies on a liberal point of reference. In Turkey, however, the process of accumulation conducted through the state is not a deviation from market rules; rather, it involves the systematic use of extra-economic coercion to reconstruct the capitalist base of a particular power bloc.

Magyar’s concept of the mafia state is valuable for concretizing the incorporation of loyalty, fear, blackmail, and informal power relations into the operation of the state. A comparative perspective with Hungary also helps clarify what is distinctive about Turkey: while the Orbán system makes more systematic and predictable use of institutional channels, informal networks and paramilitary structures play a much more central role in Turkey. At the same time, however, the concept of the mafia state offers a framework that leaves class analysis largely outside its scope and focuses instead on the behavior of individuals and networks.

Fraenkel’s Dual State approach, meanwhile, makes an important contribution to this study in understanding how law operates. The distinction between the normative state and the prerogative state provides a powerful tool for conceptualizing the instrumentalization of the judiciary in Turkey. Fraenkel’s approach, however, is primarily concerned with the relationship between law and power and remains insufficient for explaining the economic function of the state, class power relations, and crises of hegemony.

At this point, the concept of “anti-law,” developed by Ali Duran Topuz and also employed by Murat Sevinç in his writings, offers an original and complementary perspective. Anti-law does not refer to the absence of law; rather, it denotes the transformation of law itself, understood as a body of ideal norms, into a systematic instrument of lawlessness. The concept gives concrete form, under Turkey’s specific conditions, to Fraenkel’s distinction between the normative state and the prerogative state, conceptualizing the instrumentalization of the judiciary not merely as institutional deterioration, but as the expression within the legal sphere of the logic through which the power bloc reproduces itself.

To move beyond these limitations, the perspective offered by Marxist state theory is of decisive importance. Drawing on Poulantzas’s analysis of the capitalist state, Oğuz’s study of Turkey provides powerful tools for conceptualizing the transformation of the state’s coercive and ideological apparatuses, the restructuring of the power bloc, and the contradictory logic of the process of fascistization. Mahir Çayan’s framework of the new-colonial state, “colonial-type fascism,” and “covert fascism,” meanwhile, provides a complementary perspective for connecting this transformation to its historical roots and to relations of imperialist dependency.

Building on this theoretical body of work, and approaching the transformation of the superstructure—the transformation of the state, law, politics, and ideology—from a perspective attentive to its specific logic and relative autonomy, this study argues that three parallel processes operate together: the partification of the state, the personalization of the party, and the transformation of networks of interest into networks of mutual hostage-taking.

These three processes are not independent of one another. The transformation of the state into a mechanism for the reproduction of a particular power bloc, the leader’s increasingly central position within that bloc, and the binding of actors to the continuity of the system through shared risks that have accumulated over time have simultaneously enabled and necessitated one another. Existing conceptual tools can explain this synthesis only partially.

The threefold framework proposed here treats existing conceptualizations not as alternatives to one another, but as tools that explain different dimensions of the same phenomenon; by repositioning them within a perspective centered on class power relations, it seeks to interpret Turkey’s regime transformation through the partification of the state, the personalization of the party, and networks of mutual hostage-taking.

In Place of a Conclusion: The Partification of the State, the Personalization of the Party, and Networks of Mutual Hostage-Taking

This study argues that the transformation Turkey has undergone over the past quarter century can be read as a new historical phase of Mahir Çayan’s theory of “covert fascism”. Domination in Turkey continues to be legitimized through the ostensible existence of democratic institutions, while coercion, repression, and extraordinary methods are deployed when necessary. Viewed from this perspective, the AKP period represents not a break with covert fascism, but its reorganization under new conditions.

Yet this new phase is not simply a repetition of earlier periods. When the sections examined in this study are considered together, it becomes clear, as argued above, that the transformation Turkey has undergone over the past quarter century cannot be reduced to the malfunctioning of particular institutions or the erosion of democratic standards. The transformation of the judiciary into an instrument of the power bloc, the placement of extra-economic coercion at the center of capital accumulation, the reorganization of ideological apparatuses, the expansion of coercive capacity, the management of hegemonic crises through coercion and co-optation, and the incorporation of informal networks of force into the operation of the state—taken together, these developments reveal a fundamental reshaping of the class function of the state. All these transformations have carried historically existing tendencies to a new level of intensity.

Continuity should therefore be sought in the historical character of the form of domination, while novelty lies in the manner in which this form of domination is organized, its scope, and its mechanisms of operation.

The concepts proposed in this study—the partification of the state, the personalization of the party, and the transformation of networks of interest into networks of mutual hostage-taking—are precisely an attempt to explain the logic of operation of this new phase. Rather than defining a new regime type, these concepts seek to make visible the specific form that covert fascism has assumed in contemporary Turkey and the mechanisms through which the power bloc reproduces itself.

The concept of the partification of the state as used here¹⁰ does not refer merely to staffing the state apparatus with the cadres of a particular political party. What is meant is the transformation of state institutions into mechanisms for the reproduction of a particular power bloc. Although the AKP stands at the center of this bloc, the structure is not reducible to the AKP alone. The MHP, various fractions of capital, religious-order and religious-community networks, bureaucratic cliques, and different political actors have become components of this bloc. The separation of powers has effectively been eliminated, while state institutions have increasingly ceased to operate as relatively autonomous structures and have instead been reshaped in accordance with the needs of this network of alliances.

In the early years of AKP rule, the principal struggle was waged largely against the position of the old power bloc within the state apparatus. Aimed at breaking the institutional weight of the military bureaucracy, the higher judiciary, and big capital centered around TÜSİAD, this process was initially legitimized through a discourse of democratization as well. Viewed through Poulantzas’s framework, the process can be read as one in which the state, by increasing its relative autonomy from the existing power bloc, created the conditions for the construction of a new power bloc. Over time, however, it became clear that the state was exercising this autonomy not in pursuit of the “public interest,” but in accordance with the interests of the newly ascendant power bloc—Islamist-nationalist fractions of capital, religious-order networks, and the bureaucratic structures articulated with them.

The second process is the personalization of the party. Over time, the AKP’s institutional structure has acquired an increasingly leader-centered character. The weakening of internal party mechanisms of balance, the narrowing of decision-making processes, and the increasing concentration of political legitimacy around a single leader figure are among the principal indicators of this transformation. Yet the process is not limited to the centralization of political decision-making. The distribution of economic resources has likewise acquired an increasingly leader-centered character. Resource transfers carried out through public tenders, privatizations, zoning regulations, public banks, and various incentive mechanisms have strengthened the economic foundations of the power bloc, while the leader has come to occupy the center not only of political decision-making but also of the distribution of economic rents.

As Ahmet İnsel emphasizes, rather than a classical understanding of “The state is mine,” this points to a distinctive rationality of “I am the state,” in which the leader positions himself as the embodiment of the state and the sole arbiter among different centers of power. In Bekir Ağırdır’s formulation, in this process “what matters is not being an AK Party member, but being loyal to Erdoğan”; party identity has increasingly begun to dissolve into the identity of the leader.

The most concrete institutional expression of this process of personalization is the Presidential Government System, approved in the 2017 referendum and implemented following the 2018 elections. The concentration of executive power in a single office, the abolition of the Council of Ministers, and the direct subordination of the bureaucratic hierarchy to the presidency gave personalization a constitutional framework. Yet the institutional transformation had begun long before the introduction of this system. Divisions within the AKP’s founding cadres—the exclusion from the system of a number of prominent figures, including Abdullah Gül, Ahmet Davutoğlu, and Ali Babacan—were both an indication and a product of the personalization process. These eliminations were not incidental; each constituted a concrete instance of the marginalization of figures capable of constituting alternative poles of balance within the power bloc.

The party thus increasingly ceased to function as an institutional political organization and was transformed into a network of loyalty, interest, and hostage-taking organized around the leader; the state apparatus, in turn, became one of the principal mechanisms through which this network is reproduced.

The third process is the transformation of networks of interest into networks of mutual hostage-taking. The long-term stability of regimes often rests on shared interests. In the Turkish case, however, the structure that has emerged over time has come to rest not only on shared interests but also on shared risks. At the root of this development lies the expansion of mechanisms of economic and political rent through ever-widening circles. In this process, actors spanning a broad network—from the bureaucracy and local governments to the business world and media organizations—have benefited from the economic advantages provided by the system while simultaneously becoming dependent on its continuation.

The decisive dynamic in the transition from networks of interest to networks of mutual hostage-taking is the shared risk generated by a shared past: relations established through tendering mechanisms, judicial protection, practices of impunity, and informal connections have created a structure whose unraveling could produce not only economic but also legal and political consequences. This negative bond that keeps actors within the bloc—the necessity of remaining together in order not to lose what they have—has become the strongest and least visible adhesive holding the power bloc together.

These three processes operate according to a logic in which each both enables and renders the others necessary. The transformation of the state into the apparatus of a particular power bloc has required the leader to assume the position of central arbiter capable of managing the bloc’s internal contradictions. The leader’s central and decisive position, in turn, has over time created the conditions for the ties holding the power bloc together to shift increasingly toward relations of mutual hostage-taking.

The hegemonic dimension of these processes cannot be overlooked. The hegemonic project constructed around the Turkish-Islamic synthesis, nationalist and security-oriented discourse, Ottomanism, the notion of being “local and national” (yerli ve milli), and the promise of economic development has found genuine resonance among broad sections of society. Yet the hegemonic project’s capacity to produce consent has increasingly weakened, particularly with the deepening of the economic crisis. The growing weight of coercion—a broader sphere of criminalization, a more extensive regime of punishment, and more intensive media control—is a direct indication of this weakening. As Gramsci emphasizes, hegemony is a combination of consent and coercion; yet the increasing shift in this balance toward coercion points to the internal fragility of the hegemonic project.

Consequently, the question that must be asked in order to make sense of regime transformation in Turkey is this: On whose behalf, in accordance with which class interests, and through which mechanisms does the state operate? The answer to this question takes us far beyond narratives of institutional deterioration or authoritarian deviation. What confronts us is a specific conjuncture in which a particular power bloc has transformed the state apparatus in order to sustain its capital accumulation, political reproduction, and hegemonic project, and in which this transformation operates through the partification of the state, the personalization of the party, and networks of mutual hostage-taking.

On one side of this divide are those who seek to preserve the existing relations of power, networks of interest, and personalized structure of power; on the other are those who, despite coming from markedly different political traditions, advocate limiting state power, preserving political competition, and maintaining social opposition as a legitimate sphere of political life. The fundamental political struggle of the coming period will largely take shape around this axis.

During the preparation of this article, large language models (ChatGPT and Claude) were used to obtain critical feedback on the structure of the argument and for linguistic and stylistic editing. The theoretical framework, claims, and all sources in the text are the author’s own and were verified by the author. The author bears full responsibility for the content.

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Note on Terminology

Türkçe	English
ahbap-çavuş kapitalizmi	crony capitalism
açık faşizm	open fascism
anti-hukuk	anti-law
bağlılık	attachment
boyun eğdirme	subjection
devletin partileşmesi	partification of the state
dijital linç	online harassment campaigns
Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı	Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı); thereafter: the Diyanet
ekonomi-dışı zor	extra-economic coercion
ekonomik kuşatma	economic siege
egemen sınıf içi mücadeleler	struggles within the ruling class
gizli faşizm	covert fascism
hegemonya	hegemony
iç savaş	“internal war”
iktidar bloğu	power bloc
itaat	compliance
kadrolaşma	control over staffing within the state apparatus
karşılıklı rehinlik ağları	networks of mutual hostage-taking
kayyum uygulamaları	the practice of appointing trustees; thereafter: trustee appointments / trustee mechanism
kooptasyon	co-optation
maddi telafi mekanizmaları	mechanisms of material compensation
mahpus	prisoner
negatif bağ	negative bond
oligarşik yönetim	oligarchic rule
OHAL ve KHK rejimi	the state of emergency and the regime of decree-laws
partinin kişiselleşmesi	personalization of the party
paylaşım mücadelesi / paylaşım savaşı	struggles over distribution
sandık demokrasisi	electoral democracy
sermaye tabanı	capitalist base
sömürge tipi faşizm	colonial-type fascism
taraflılık	partiality
tarikat ağları	religious-order networks
tasfiye	dismantling
tarihsel uğrak	historical conjuncture
Türkiyelileşme	“becoming a party of Turkey” (Türkiyelileşme)
yeni sömürge devlet	new-colonial state
yeni sömürgecilik	new colonialism
yeni-sömürge ülkeler	new-colonial countries
zor / rıza	coercion / consent

Footnotes

1. The term “new colonialism” (yeni sömürgecilik) is used here to preserve Çayan’s own terminology and to distinguish his specific formulation from the broader literature on neo-colonialism. Çayan did not originate the concept of neo-colonialism; rather, his distinctive contribution lay in systematically relating changing forms of imperialist domination to “covert occupation,” the internalization of imperialism, oligarchic dictatorship, “colonial-type fascism,” and “covert fascism. “ For a discussion of Çayan’s formulation in relation to postcolonial and neo-colonial debates, see Mustafa Eren, “Postkolonyal Tartışmalar Bağlamında Mahir Çayan’ın ‘Yeni Sömürgecilik’ Görüşü,” BirGün, 31 March 2012. ↩

2. The reference to Çayan also contains an implicit critique of the exclusion of the theoretical production of revolutionary movements in Turkey from academic debate. Figures such as Mahir Çayan, Deniz Gezmiş, and İbrahim Kaypakkaya are often treated solely as actors in the history of political struggle, while their analyses of dependency, the state, class, and the national question are not regarded as legitimate sources of theoretical debate. The use of Çayan in this study also reflects a preference for bringing these theoretical contributions into academic discussion. This does not rest on the claim that every element of Çayan’s analysis remains valid today. Rather, the aim is to open up for discussion which aspects of his conceptualizations of the new-colonial state, the internalization of imperialism, and “covert fascism” retain their explanatory power for understanding relations of domination in contemporary Turkey, and which aspects need to be reconsidered. ↩

3. “The oligarchic rule in countries such as ours can readily govern through a full-fledged dictatorship in which the working masses are deprived of democratic rights and freedoms. We may also call this colonial-type fascism. This rule is exercised either through a ‘representative democracy’ that has nothing whatsoever to do with classical bourgeois democracy (covert fascism), or openly, without any regard for electoral democracy. Its open form, however, is not permanent. It is generally a method resorted to when the regime loses control of the situation. “ — Mahir Çayan. [Translation by the author] ↩

4. Contemporary Turkey is, of course, not the same as the Turkey of the early 1970s, when Çayan developed this analysis. The imperialist system, relations of dependency, and the room for manoeuvre available to new-colonial countries have clearly changed considerably. This historical transformation raises the question of which aspects of Çayan’s analysis of the new-colonial order and covert fascism remain relevant and which need to be reconsidered. This study does not seek to provide a definitive answer to this question; rather, it aims to open up a discussion of the explanatory possibilities that this theoretical framework offers for understanding the contemporary transformation of the regime. ↩

5. The concept of “networks of mutual hostage-taking” used in this study is an original analytical proposition developed by drawing on Magyar’s analysis of the mafia state (2016; Magyar and Madlovics, 2020). Going beyond this literature, the concept refers to relations of dependence arising not only from shared interests, but also from the necessity of protecting shared risks accumulated in the past and mutual vulnerabilities. ↩

6. Directly documenting this situation is methodologically difficult under conditions in which independent judicial oversight and mechanisms of transparency have ceased to function effectively. This difficulty, however, does not render the structural relationship invisible. On the contrary, it raises the question of whether mechanisms of accountability may themselves have been rendered ineffective in order to sustain this relationship. ↩

7. The reason for placing particular emphasis here on left-wing and revolutionary movements and the Kurdish movement is that they have historically constituted the most intensive and persistent targets of the penal system and the state’s coercive apparatuses. At the same time, the state’s relationship with different social and political groups throughout the history of the Republic has not been uniform. While left-wing and Kurdish movements have largely been targeted by policies of repression and dismantling, Islamist movements have at times been pushed outside the system and at other times supported by the state and incorporated into the system, particularly for use against left-wing and Kurdish movements. Alevis and non-Muslim communities, meanwhile, have been subjected less to penal policies than to the citizenship regime, official ideology, and mechanisms of institutional exclusion, while their demands for equal citizenship remained unmet for long periods. The historical function of the state’s coercive apparatuses has therefore been shaped not only through practices of repression, but also through the exclusion, control, direction, and, when necessary, incorporation of different social groups into the system. ↩

8. The political threat that Gezi posed from the perspective of the power bloc emerged simultaneously with an economic conjuncture that was far from coincidental. As Akçay demonstrates, 2013 marked not only a political turning point but also the point at which the neoliberal-populist model pursued by the AKP for more than a decade began to reach its limits. When the US Federal Reserve signaled a rise in interest rates in May 2013, bringing the period of abundant and cheap liquidity toward an end, capital outflows from emerging-market economies such as Turkey accelerated, beginning to undermine the material foundations of the mechanisms of financial inclusion and partial welfare on which the accumulation model rested. This process eroded the economic foundations of neoliberal populism’s capacity to produce consent. What was critical from the perspective of the power bloc was that the capacity for cross-class mobilization revealed by Gezi emerged precisely as this economic vulnerability was deepening. As the material foundations of the hegemonic project were being shaken, political opposition also assumed a visible and mass form. This convergence is crucial for understanding why authoritarianization took such a rapid and comprehensive form after 2013. ↩

9. The attempted coup of 15 July, described by the government as “a gift from God,” can also be read through Agamben, offering a different perspective. The concepts of “social death” and “civil death,” used to describe the condition of the thousands of people dismissed from their jobs by decree-law after the coup attempt, can be regarded as adaptations to the Turkish context of Agamben’s concept of homo sacer (sacred man). Under what Agamben calls a “permanent state of exception,” government can deprive individuals of legal status, leaving them exposed to all forms of intervention—homo sacer denotes “bare life,” stripped of legal protections, exposed to any intervention by the state, yet physically kept alive. In Turkey, this function has largely been assumed by the judiciary: cases based on secret-witness testimony, prolonged periods of detention, and the disregard of ECtHR judgments create an environment in which it becomes uncertain who may be deprived of legal protections, and when. ↩

10. As indicated in the text, the concept of the “partification of the state” used in this study does not refer to the identification of the state with a single political party. What is meant is the transformation of the state apparatus into a mechanism for the reproduction of a particular power bloc. At the same time, it is clear that the structure that has emerged cannot be explained through the concept of partification alone. When phenomena such as the use of the judiciary and law enforcement to reorganize the political and economic spheres, as well as the incorporation of blackmail, threats, dispossession, and various informal relations into political processes, are taken into account, this structure can clearly be approached through other conceptualizations as well. The concept employed here should therefore be regarded not as a definitive designation, but as an analytical proposition intended to open up discussion. ↩