TURKEY’S DEVOLUTION: Erdogan Moves Against the Mainstream Opposition.

The Turkish police on Monday morning raided the houses of and detained senior staff at Turkey’s oldest and one of its most respected daily newspapers. . . .

The detentions come a day after the firing of a further 10,000 civil servants and the closing of 15 other media outlets. Since the 15 July coup attempt, the government had already fired more than 100,000 people, detained 75,000 and arrested (which is a distinct and more legally serious measure in Turkey) another 35,000. What difference at this point does the arrest of 12 journalists make?

Quite a lot, actually. This marks the start of a new stage in the efforts to crush opposition to Erdogan’s rule. Until now, the purge has focused on those who have either plausibly had some association with the Gulenist movement, which the government blames for the coup (however tenuously), or on Kurds. As a result, the purge up to now hasn’t garnered much objection from the main opposition parties; nor has it particularly advanced Erdogan’s ultimate goal of establishing a Sultan-esque position for himself and institutional monopoly for his party. The (theoretically temporary) extension on October 3 of the State of Emergency law, which grants Erdogan effective power to rule by decree, raised eyebrows, but it didn’t end the post-coup honeymoon period that saw all of Turkey’s non-Kurdish opposition parties rally together in support of preserving democratic government.

Now, Erdogan’s Turkey has not been a friendly place, to put it mildly, for journalists or the opposition for some time. Cumhuriyet’s previous editor, Can Dundar, survived an assassination attempt in May while on trial for revealing Turkish intelligence’s support for Islamist rebels in Syria. He was convicted, and has since fled the country.

But the laughable charges against Cumhuriyet’s current staff—terroristic support for the Gulenist movement and the PKK—mark a new phase in Erdogan’s opposition suppression project. In an encouraging move, within hours of the arrests, Kemalist Republican People’s Party (CHP) leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu defied a ban imposed in Ankara against public demonstrations and met with with opposition protesters at a rally outside the newspaper’s offices.

When stuff like this happens, you have to respond fast and hard. If you don’t, the opposition will be defeated in detail until there’s no opposition left.