The regime of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Türkiye is staging a preemptive political coup before the eyes of the entire world. Erdoğan first removed the elected leadership of the Republican People’s Party (CHP)—the main parliamentary opposition party and leading party in the polls—through a politically motivated court ruling, then ordered riot police to forcibly seize the party’s headquarters.
What is unfolding in Türkiye is not a purely national event but a manifestation of an international collapse of democratic forms of rule rooted in the deepening crisis of the capitalist system. US President Donald Trump, having lost the November 2020 elections, mounted a failed coup on January 6, 2021, seeking to remain in power illegally. Erdoğan, for his part, is attempting to forestall a likely defeat in the next elections by neutralizing his principal rival.
Workers and youth must oppose this preemptive coup—which threatens fundamental democratic rights and whose target is ultimately the working class.
The Turkish working class is entering this struggle in a mood of explosive opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the US war against Iran. In the first days of the war against Iran, workers at the Polyak mine in İzmir tore down a gendarmerie barricade and seized control of the mine. Last month, Turkish politics was dominated by the struggle of Doruk Mining workers in Ankara.
Though polls show that more than 90 percent of the Turkish population opposes the war against Iran and the presence of US military bases in Türkiye, Erdoğan has effectively aligned himself with the Trump administration’s aggression in the Middle East and continues to facilitate the flow of oil from Azerbaijan to Israel. Across the Middle East, the overwhelming majority of the population is seething with anger at their ruling elites’ collaboration with US imperialism and Israeli Zionism.
Erdoğan and his allies are working to suppress the emergence within the Turkish, Middle Eastern and international working class—already battered by a severe cost-of-living crisis—of a movement against genocide and imperialist war.
Hellbound and Down 