Another opposition mayor in Turkey was arrested this week, bringing the number to 20. At one level, this looks familiar by now - the steady use of the judiciary, the gradual weakening of opposition figures and the quiet bending of institutions, a pattern we have seen before and learned, perhaps too quickly, to recognise.

Turkey’s main opposition leader Özgür Özel put it rather bluntly, reading Syria, Iran and Turkey through the same Trump-shaped assumption that regimes can be changed from the outside and suitable replacements installed, and his point was not only about foreign policy but about the licence this grants to authoritarians at home.

Municipalities in Turkey remain one of the last arenas in which opposition forces can accumulate governing capacity under conditions where national politics is increasingly foreclosed, which is precisely why they are being taken back through the weaponisation of the judiciary from the hands of the CHP, disregarding the will of the millions who voted for them in the 2024 local elections.

Surely it is not only in Turkey but this the norm in the region where authoritarian regimes race by the number of political prisoners. The war waged against by US and Israel did not produce the dynamics of the authoritarianism but will amplify them, lowering the cost of repression, dulling attention, and allowing what would otherwise be more visible to recede into the background.

 (The main photo will make sense once you read the piece.)