In Turkey, several media and journalists have been threatened by nationalist circles

Turkish journalists are under increasing threat from extreme right-wing politicians just before next year’s presidential and parliamentary elections in Turkey, Reporters Without Borders revealed, stressing that the media and press are under enormous pressure. Erol Onderoglu, the representative of Reporters Without Borders in Turkey, said that the fear is mounting that “threats from extreme nationalist circles will open the way for another spiral of violence against journalists, as happened in the 2019 local elections,” noting that violence and threats are supposed to have no place in a democratic electoral process.

Targeting media

In recent months, the ruling coalition of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its junior coalition partner, the far-right Nationalist Movement Party, and figures associated with media parties have been targeted. Meanwhile, following new digital censorship legislation introduced by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) to the Turkish parliament in May to criminalize “misinformation,” Turkey has launched a new wave of arrests targeting journalists, according to the Turkish website Ahval. Reporters Without Borders revealed how Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu launched a verbal attack earlier this month on the leftist daily BirGün, accusing a journalist of being the “mouthpiece” of the banned Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a terrorist group listed by Ankara and had been in a 40-year war for Kurdish self-rule in Turkey.

Explicit threats

The AKP and MHP leadership threatened HaberTürk TV earlier this month, over comments made by former opposition MP Berhan Simsek. The President of the Center for Students’ Examinations (ÖYSM) has links to the extremist Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), while expressing his dismay at the growing influence of religious groups in the country, accusing the former MP of being “hostile to the presidential coalition” and publicly threatened by MHP leader Devlet Bahçeli, who said that Simsek “will pay the price”. Reporters Without Borders noted that the defeat of the AKP-MHP alliance in the March 2019 local elections followed months of violence against opposition journalists. The 2023 election also points to tensions, and Turkey is preparing for one in which several polling companies say the president is running behind an opposition coalition.