After the Second World War, Europe had to rebuild more than its shattered cities; it had to reestablish its political order. The lesson drawn from the catastrophe was that lasting peace could not rest on military balances alone. Europe's security would also have to be anchored in the rule of law, democratic institutions, and fundamental rights.
As a founding member of the Council of Europe, a NATO ally and a participant in the Helsinki process, Türkiye helped build this shared democratic order from the start. What I offer here is therefore not an outsider's opinion, but a call from within a tradition we helped create on how it can be strengthened in changing times.
I write these words from a prison cell. As an elected mayor and a presidential candidate, I have come to understand in the most dramatic way what these principles mean in everyday political life.
In today’s volatile world, Europe is rightly investing in its defence and deterrence; and it must show the same resolve in defending its democratic security.
The threats facing Europe have changed since the end of the Cold War. Cyberattacks, disinformation, foreign interference in elections, the misuse of artificial intelligence, the rise of the far right, terrorism, all have moved to the centre of the security debate, and Europe is rightly developing new tools to confront them. But these are not the only threats we face.
Today, democratic order is also threatened from within through the very institutions built to protect it. Bodies meant to safeguard the rule of law and democratic competition can slowly become instruments for narrowing both.
Law can cease to act as a common restraint on power and become instead a means of shaping political competition. Public authority can lose its neutrality and turn into part of a machinery for keeping those already in power in their place. Elections still happen, but the range of genuine choices open to voters grows steadily narrower. From a distance, little seems to have changed; in reality, the substance of democratic life is being transformed.
And this is why democratic security is not simply about preserving democratic institutions. It is about preserving citizens' confidence that they can change those who govern them by democratic means. When people come to doubt that their vote truly counts, that opposing views can compete on equal terms, or that the law protects everyone alike, the consequences reach well beyond politics: the institutions of the state weaken, economic confidence suffers, and social peace grows fragile.
What we face in Türkiye has long since moved beyond a series of isolated developments or individual breaches of law. The line between the state and the government of the day has grown increasingly blurred. The impartiality of public institutions has been worn down by appointments that owe more to loyalty than to merit, and by a climate of fear. The judiciary, rather than applying the rules of political life as an independent arbiter, is increasingly drawn into deciding who may take part in that life, and on what terms.
In today's legal and political debate, this method increasingly has a name: “lawfare”. Law that should protect democratic order and political competition is turned instead to defining the limits of democratic life, and to keeping those in power at almost any cost.
What is happening in Türkiye today, then, is not simply a question of the freedom of a handful of individuals. It is part of a larger story: the wearing away of trust between the will of the voters and the institutions meant to serve them.
I am living through this transformation in my own trial. When I said openly that I was not being given a fair trial, the Council of Europe's Commissioner for Human Rights drew attention to my case and affirmed a principle that should not need restating: that anyone facing trial must be given a genuine and effective opportunity to present a defence and to be heard. The court has since said that I will have that opportunity, yet it has not said when, or for how long. A right of defence means little until it can be exercised in full. That is a basic requirement of a fair trial, and it should be beyond dispute.
For this reason, the struggle we are waging is not Türkiye's alone. It is also one of the most serious tests of the democratic security Europe has spent decades building. What is happening here is one instance of a pressure democracies across the continent now face: the machinery of elections preserved, while the substance of choice is hollowed out. This is why democratic security cannot stop at national borders. It is an indivisible responsibility.
Opposition-run municipalities showed that another way of governing was possible. For the first time in years, millions of Turkish citizens met not just a different political rhetoric but a different experience of being governed: public resources managed openly, social policy that strengthened people's dignity, participation that meant more than an election promise. Above all, they saw that the opposition could do more than criticise. It could govern, and it could solve problems.
One example is the Anne Kart, or Mother Card, which we introduced in Istanbul. By making public transport free for mothers with young children, it lets them get to work, reach a hospital, take a child to the park. It restores a mother's connection to the city around her. Policies like these did more than strengthen the opposition politically. They established it as a credible alternative, capable of governing the country.
Well-governed cities changed more than the cities themselves; they changed the country's political imagination. People began to believe that a different kind of government was possible, and local administration became more than a provider of municipal services. It became the most visible expression of a democratic alternative.
That is precisely why municipalities became an early target of lawfare. The aim was never only to control who ran a few cities; it was to weaken society's belief that democratic change is possible at all.
The judicial and administrative measures against elected mayors, then, cannot be read as questions of local government, any more than the legal proceedings against the main opposition party can be read as a set of unrelated cases. They belong to a single process: one that limits what democratic alternatives are allowed to achieve in office and weakens people's belief that change is still possible by democratic means. What is being redrawn are the boundaries of democratic competition itself.
Institutions of the Council of Europe, from the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities to the Parliamentary Assembly, have followed the measures against elected local representatives closely in recent years. The Venice Commission has warned that prolonged detention damages not only individual rights but the ability of citizens to take part in the local government they voted for. And the European Parliament has treated these events not as an internal Turkish question but as a matter bearing on Europe's shared democratic security.
A security order founded on common principles cannot stay silent when those principles are eroded. History has shown, again and again, that concessions made at democracy's expense in the name of short-term stability end by doing lasting damage to security itself.
Our society is not simply looking for a new set of politicians. It is looking for a new relationship with the state, and for a government capable of rebuilding trust between citizens and public institutions.
A new party, Yeni Parti, has been founded under the leadership of Özgür Özel by the large majority of MPs who left the Republican People's Party to build it, and I have chosen to continue my own political struggle within it. Its ambition must be to build a new kind of politics, participatory and inclusive: one that treats law as the guarantee of political competition rather than its instrument, that exercises public power transparently, that recognises local government as an essential institution of democracy, and that regards different ideas not as threats but as part of the richness of democratic life.
Türkiye is living through a political crisis, but also through a chance for democratic renewal. And Europe also faces a question of its own. Not simply how it responds to Türkiye, but whether it will defend its own democratic security with the same determination it brings to every other threat it faces.
I write these final words as someone deprived of his freedom, yet I remain hopeful. That hope rests on my faith in my country's democratic experience, in its people, and in their will to shape a common future. Democratic trust can be rebuilt, even in the hardest times, because democracy endures not through institutions alone but through the people who give those institutions life again. That will be our shared work
