[remind_me_again]

It's a very subjective judgement and everyone is entitled his or her own opinion. But that one is very biased. As far as elections concerned Turkish election system is very solid as a process and implementation is solid. In the end Erdogan lost Istanbul in the last elections even after that election repeated for only Istanbul, and worse for Erdogan, the second round was much more decisive. People didn't like the election were repeated.

Also, don't fall to the expressions like, "Turkish here", "German there". These does not make anyone expert nor without bias.

[brian_cloutier]

To give everyone an idea of how solid the process is: consider that the opposition candidate widely considered most capable of beating the incumbent president was recently sentenced to two years in jail and removed from politics on the weakest of pretenses: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Ekrem_%C4%B0mamo%C4...

Here are a few other biased sources offering their subjective judgements:

- https://freedomhouse.org/country/turkey/freedom-world/2022

- https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/turkeys-local-elections-wer...

- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fraud_and_violence...

- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index

- https://www.idea.int/democracytracker/report/turkey/december...

This is not to say that Turkey is full autocracy: the incubent president has a genuinely large amount of support and it's quite possible they would win a free and fair election. However, the upcoming election will not be free and fair as those terms are commonly understood.

[arp242]

> This is not to say that Turkey is full autocracy: the incubent president has a genuinely large amount of support and it's quite possible they would win a free and fair election.

This is kind of skewed though, if people can't go on TV or Twitter and say "Erdogan doesn't know what he's doing and his policies are foolish".

This is really the modern autocrat's secret weapon: have reasonably(-ish) fair(-ish) elections, but also rig things in such a way that people only hear one side of the story. It's not a surprise people support Erdogan if they only hear how brilliant he is with tepid criticism at best. Control the narrative → control the vote. Ergodan, Putin, Xi all play by this book.

Having a free press and free investigative journalism is critical; without it you don't really have fair elections, even if the actual business of casting and counting ballots is sound and free of fraud.

[toyg]

> This is really the modern autocrat's secret weapon

Hardly: Mussolini also had some sort of elections. It just happened that parliamentarians who were too much of a nuisance had unfortunate encounters with groups of hard batons, or were required to live on remote islands. In Putin's Russia they fall from balconies.

[toyg]

Erdogan literally imprisons any opposition leader who comes close to be an actual challenger. He's done it twice already in the last 7 years.

It's just not funny anymore. Some people in Turkey might enjoy living under a dictator (after all, many did in Italy and Germany, and many do in a lot of other countries today), but let's not pretend that water is not wet.

[aiProgMach]

> Also, don't fall to the expressions like, "Turkish here", "German there". These does not make anyone expert nor without bias.

Exactly! I'm from another global south country. Usually when someone on these sites say "${their_country} here" I prepare myself for the worst takes because I know this happens in my country, usually it's some liberal who read/work in western leaning media and repeat what they hear. It's an echo chamber so huge that you can't touch it's walls so it's hard to know you actually live in an echo chamber.