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Turkish politician Meral Akener at her home in Istanbul in May 2017.Rena Effendi for TIME

Meral Aksener doesnt run from fights. Turkeys former interior minister is known informally as asena , or she-wolf. When the country's military took steps in 1997 to remove the government from power, she took a stand against its leaders. A general threatened to have the young lawmaker impaled on an oily spike that well put in front of the ministry. Testifying about the conversation in court in 2013, she brushed the comment off. I did what I was supposed to do, she said.

As she once defied the military, her supporters hope she can stand in the way of the collapse of Turkeys democracy, one year after another attempted coup . A veteran nationalist, Aksener campaigned vigorously against a constitutional overhaul proposed by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that is set to replace Turkeys parliamentary system with one dominated by his own powerful presidency. Erdogan won a narrow, disputed victory in the referendum on April 16, but Aksener won herself a far higher profile. She drew throngs to raucous campaign rallies around the country where she urged the public to vote no. Huge crowds chanted, Prime Minister Meral!

Now, Akseners name (pronounced Ak-she-ner) has been whispered as a possible challenger to Erdogan in the presidential election expected in 2019. Aides reveal to TIME she is planning to announce a new political party. Speaking to TIME at her Istanbul home in May, her face lit up when she spoke about how she rattles Erdogan. I ruin his comfort zone, she says, because he knows I am a real competitor.

Few would dare stand up to this regime. After a combined 14 years as prime minister and president, Erdogan has acted to suppress nearly every source of opposition, sidelining other leaders within his party, jailing opposition lawmakers, and censoring critical news organizations. He has done so while winning a series of elections, modeling a style of politics similar to the conservative brand of populism that swept Europe and America in 2016.

The repression accelerated in the aftermath of the failed and bloody coup one year ago, on July 15, 2016. More than 50,000 people have been detained so far, including journalists, students, and civil servants. The crackdown has intensified lately. In July, police arrested 10 human rights activists including Amnesty Internationals Turkey director on terrorism charges.

Opposition politicians are not immune. In June, a court sentenced an opposition lawmaker to 25 years in prison in connection with a government leak case, one of a dozen now behind bars. The leader of Turkeys largest opposition CHP party, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, staged a 280-mile protest march from Ankara to Istanbul in response, that culminated in a vast justice rally in Istanbul that was the largest show of opposition in years. This is the era of dictatorship, he told the crowd.

But the grey-haired, bespectacled opposition leader is in poor position to mount a genuine challenge to Erdogan. His secular-establishment CHP has been unable to win a national election for 15 years, and observers of Turkish politics think he lacks the ruthlessness to take on the President. Even people in my family, they think Kemal Kilicdaroglu is a great guy, but he just doesnt know how to play Erdogans game. And to beat him, you have to play his game, says Gonul Tol, the director of the Center for Turkish Studies at the Middle East Institute in Washington. Meral Aksener on the other hand, the way she conveys the message of those who are opposed to Erdogan, or who are uncomfortable with his rule, I think shes done a great job in terms of communicating that message.

Aksener poses a unique threat to Erdogan because her brand of politics draws from a similar pool of pro-business, religious, and nationalist voters as the president. She is unapologetically conservative, and has been called the Turkish answer to French far-right leader Marine Le Pen . She is hawkish toward Kurdish separatists. She says she would allow Turkeys three million Syrian refugees to remain in the country, but she has unspecified concerns about their presence. Still, she insists she can attract support from across the political spectrum, including Kurds, noting her frequent campaign visits to the Kurdish-majority southeast. She also rejects any comparison between her style of politics and the racism of the European far right. We dont do politics based on race or ethnicity, she says. Our definition of the nation is based on shared memories, share ties, and shared joys.

Yet her principled opposition to Erdogan's constitutional power-grab allowed her to expand her appeal to disaffected members of AKP and even to some left-leaning voters. Unlike the secular republican Kilicdaroglu, who has been criticized for failing to reach beyond his base of elite urbanites, Aksener has the potential to undermine the presidents coalition. She is a major political threat to President Erdogan, says Aykan Erdemir, a liberal Turkish politician who served in parliament with Aksener. Aksener could be an attractive candidate to Turkeys center-right electorate, and so she has the potential to steal voters from Erdogan and the AKP.

Born in 1956 in Izmit, a medium-sized city outside of Istanbul, Aksener is the descendant of immigrants from Greece. She developed an interest in politics as a young girl when Izmit elected Turkeys first woman mayor, Layla Atakan. After earning a PhD in history, she quit her post as a university department chair in 1994, winning a seat in parliament a year later as a member of the secular conservative True Path Party.

Within a few years of entering parliament, Aksener became a central player in Turkeys national political drama. She was appointed interior minister in a coalition government led by Islamist Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan. It was an era of political violence, as the Turkish state waged an increasingly dirty war with Kurdish separatists. The tumult came to a crescendo in the winter and spring of 1997 when the military issued an ultimatum to the government in what became known as the postmodern coup.

It was then that Aksener made her stand against the armed forces meddling, rebuffing General Cetin Saners threat to impale her on a spike. She established her independence from Turkeys military, which has pushed aside four elected governments since 1960. She also declined to press charges against Saner, showing restraint that stands in contrast with Erdogans ferocious response to the 2016 coup. She was not vengeful, which is something you cannot say about Erdogan, says Erdemir.

Then and now, Aksener continues to insist on a core conservative principle: rule of law. Her insistence on institutions and procedure stands in contrast with Erdogans emotional populism. Erdogans world is black and white, she says. I dont believe in the rule of right and wrong. I believe in the rule of law, she says. She also criticizes Erdogans traditionalist views on women. He prefers us at home, she says.

But Aksener has a long association with some of the harder edges of Turkish politics. After she was forced out of office in the 1997 coup, Aksener re-entered parliament 10 years later as a member of the right-wing Nationalist Action Party (MHP), a party that traces its origins to the brutal past of Turkeys far-right. The partys youth movement, known as the Grey Wolves, was implicated in a series of assassinations during the mayhem of the 1970s and 80s, when the country was roiled by a previous military coup and widespread political violence. To this day, MHP members still flash the Grey Wolves salute, forming a wolfs head with one hand, extending the index finger and pinky to form ears.

Aksener herself flashes the grey wolf signal at her rallies, and her politics reflects her long-held nationalism. In the past she has opposed peace talks with the militants of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), Turkeys adversary in a long-running war. Asked to reassure ethnic minority voters about her vision for the country, she suggests that Turkeys current legal framework is enough to address minorities needs. Every minority living in Turkey is protected under the laws and agreements, she says.

Aksener joined the MHP when chairman Devlet Bahceli rebranded the party in 2007, shunning the groups violent past and presenting a more professional face. Elected again to parliament that year, she served two terms and became deputy speaker of the assembly, where colleagues remember her as someone who formed friendships across party lines and cracked jokes while chairing the parliaments sessions.

No longer a member of parliament, she split with the MHP leadership in 2016 over Erdogan's bid to transform Turkeys constitution. Instead of joining her party in backing the president, Aksener gave voice to a dissident faction. When she and other rebel nationalists called a party congress in an Ankara hotel in an attempt to oust the MHPs leadership, police sealed off the building. Outside, a roiling crowd of men surged against the barricades. Aksener climbed on top of a bus and spoke through a bullhorn, urging the courts to take action. You must immediately correct this mistake, [this] chaos and unlawfulness, she said . In June an Ankara court once again ruled against the MHP dissidents, and Aksener ruled out another bid for the party leadership. "I closed that chapter," she told reporters on July 3.

Now Aksener is considering a bid for her country's leadership under a new banner. But she is far from a perfect political candidate; she counts her deep experience in government as an advantage, at a time when outsiders seem to be sweeping elections across the planet. "Aksener is the Hillary Clinton of Turkey's presidential election," says Turkish political analyst Selim Sazak . "Everyone kinda sorta wants Aksener in power, but she's like a prune juice. It's good for your health, but it's not appetizing."

At the same time, there are precious few candidates in Turkey with a legitimate shot at challenging Erdogan. Dissident leaders within Erdogan's own party have failed to step forward and challenge the president. Others have paid bitterly for their defiance.

Selahattin Demirtas , for example, the popular leader of a pro-Kurdish party is now in prison on terrorism charges after he and at least 10 other lawmakers from his party who were arrested in November 2016. The crackdown decimated Demirtas Peoples Democratic Party (HDP), the parliaments third largest. In her interview with TIME, Aksener broke with her nationalist brethren and criticized the arrests of the pro-Kurdish lawmakers. "Erdogan is trying to threaten Kurdish society, that is why he put them in jail right before the referendum," she said.

Aksener herself has not escaped the governments fury. Pro-government media have assailed her with salacious claims about her personal life. She has received death threats. She regards the smears and threats as an orchestrated campaign to scare her. Since April 2016 theyve been trying to get me to back down, and I havent.

Chastened by the recent crackdown, other opposition figures believe the government will simply find a way to stop Aksener. Asked about her, a senior official in Demirtas Peoples Democratic Party said, Anybody whose name is mentioned as a possible presidential candidate, all of these goons and trolls and media people, theyll do smear campaigns to disqualify them, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the party has not yet taken a stance on the presidential election.

Aksener has yet to decide whether she'll put her head above the parapet and take Erdogan on. Since the referendum campaign, she has bided her time, cooking and going for long walks with her husband outside her Istanbul home. The walks are a chance for her to reflect and make assessments, she says. I concentrate better when Im on the move.

One thing she won't do, she says, is run. She has no passport, and if Erdogan's authorities show up to arrest her along with the many thousands of others perceived to have crossed him, she will once again do what she is supposed to do. Be my guest, she says, Im here.

Vilday Ay contributed reporting.

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Turkey's 'Iron Lady' Meral Aksener Is Getting Ready to Challenge Erdogan - TIME

The Turkish flag was stained with the blood of the young man holding it up. He had been waving it when he wasshot by soldiers who carried out last summers attempted coup. Handing over the torn national banner to Recep Tayyip Erdogan, he declared: I want to give it to you because you are the one who would know how to really value something so precious.

The encounter, at the headquarters of the ruling AK Party, was stage-managed, but the emotions behind the coming commemoration of the first anniversary of the failed coupwerereal enough. Turkeys President and his followers were celebrating victory over the 15July Plotters, but they were also mourning the 249 who died and the 2,200 wounded when the people took to the streets against the aircraft, tanks and helicopter-gunships of the mutinous troops.

There isalso anger directed at enemies, real and perceived, home and abroad. There have been mass purges sincethe takeover blamed on the followers of the exiled cleric Fethullah Gulenwas thwarted. Tens of thousands are in prison; others have been sacked from their jobs; some havefled into exile. At the same time simmering tension and confrontation with Kurdish separatists of the PKK has turned into a full-blown military conflict. And with it, say critics, has come more political suppression.

The Turkish government has been widely attacked by human rights organisations and politicians in the West over the punitive measures enacted. Mr Erdogan and his supporters have railed against the criticism as unjust and hypocritical,even alleging signsof racism and Islamophobia. Amid the accusations and recriminations, plans for the country to join the European Union seem to be slipping further away than ever.

Dissent internally has been muted following thewaves of arrests. But hundreds of thousands gathered ata rally in Istanbul last Sunday evening in a revolt against injustice. There were cheers for Kemal Kilindaroglu, the leader of the opposition Republican Peoples Party(CHP), who led the march to the city from Ankara. The huge showing, he declared, was a rebirth for us, for our country and our children.

Mr Erdogan lashed out about the Istanbul rally at the party headquarters in Ankara. The CHP and their supporters, he charged, could be accused of being terrorist lovers, who carried out their walk for Gulen, for the PKK. They say their march is comparable with the martyrs and those who gave their blood for democracy fighting the coup. They are shameless hypocrites.

In front of the adulatory crowd, who chanted his name and broke into prolonged applause, the Presidentcontinued:They walked 450kmin this march of theirs;did they spend four and a half minutes of that time thinking about those killed by terrorists? We are the ones who care about those who suffered; we are the ones fighting the terrorists.

The ongoing conflictmeant there would be no end to the state of emergency which was brought in for a year after the attempted coup. Just hours before Mr Erdogan spoke on Tuesday, 14 more army officers were arrested and arrest warrants were issued for 51 people, including 34 former employees of the state broadcaster TRT. Among those arrested the next day was Ali Avci, a film producer, who made a documentary about President Erdoganalong withonecalled The Awakeningabout the failed coup. He was accused by the authorities of having links to the Gulenist Terror Organisation.

There can be no question of lifting emergency rule with all this happening, said the President. We will lift the emergency rule only when we no longer need to fight terrorism.

The terrorists will be punished legally and until this happens, the court list will grow. At present 50,000 remain detained and 150,000 have been sacked or suspended from the armed forces, civil service and the private sector.

The Turkish government is attempting to extradite Mr Gulen who had been living in Pennsylvania since 1999 and was, until last summer, an ally of the AK Party.Mr Erdogan, who has vowed to pursue the cleric to the end, asked the newly elected Donald Trump for help in sending him back. But there has been little progress on the legal action, with Justice Department officials in Washington privately saying that despite sending a voluminous amount of material, Ankara has been short on providing incriminating evidence.

Mr Gulen, in a rare public statement, said this week that he is prepared to return to Turkey if the US agrees to extradition. But he insisted once again that he was innocent. To this day, I have stood against all coups. My respect for the military aside, I have always been against interventions, he stated. If any one among those soldiers had called me and told me of their plan, I would tell them you are committing murder.The cleric accused Mr Erdogan of being the real oppressor who caused all this suffering and oppressed thousands of innocents. I want to spit on his face.

The impasse over the Gulen extradition is a major sourceofcomplaints about the West from the Turkish government. If there was a coup attempt in the US and the person who organised it was living in Turkey we know exactly what the Americans will say and do, Bekir Bozdag, the justice minister, pointed out.

We have sent them all the documents, so why is he not being extradited? People in US and Europe know about Bin Laden, well we know about Gulen. I personally know all about the putsch. I was speaking in parliament when they bombed it and a bomb landed 15 to 20 metresfrom me. I am lucky to be here today, he added.

The US and Europe, meanwhile, was quick to raise so-called human rights abuses Mr Bozdagsaid. They lecture us on abiding by the law. But everything we are doing is by the law. They talk about torture and mistreatment of prisoners. But when we say tell us where this is taking place and to who, they do not provide anything. Sometimes they choose to believe the lies told by the guilty people. No one who is innocent is going to prison.

Belgin Aksoy has become used to such assertions. There is no point in even trying to argue against things like that, black is white and white is black in Turkey now. I just get on with what I need to do, she said. All her time is devoted to working for the release of her husband, arrested in the crackdown following the coup, facing up to 45 years in prison on charges of belonging to the Fethullah Terrorist Organisation.

Her husbandDemir used to work as a civil servant before being accused of being a Gulenist sleeper and detained last October when police smashed into their homein Istanbul late at night. The judge who was investigating him was arrested for allegedly being a Gulenist three months later. The new judge handling the case has warned MsAksoy that the process will be slow because of his huge workload. The government has announced that 175 new prisons needed to be built this year.

I cry from time to time. But the best thing to do is keep busy. I have to look after our three children, see my husband in jail one day and work part-time three days. It will take time but I am hopeful he will be freed, said 31-year-old Mrs Aksoy. The accusations against my husband are unjust. We were totally against the coup and we are glad it failed. There are many in the same situation as my Demir. But their voices wont be heard on this anniversary. They are the voices which have been made to disappear.

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Turkey coup anniversary: Erdogan says he will lift emergency rule only when 'we no longer need to fight terrorism' - The Independent

The Turkish journalist at the centre of the intervention that changed the course of a coup attempt last year has told Euronews that she was offered hundreds of thousands of dollars for the phone on which she broadcast a live message from president Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Hande Firat held up her mobile on the CNN Turk channel at around midnight on July 15, 2016 after soldiers had occupied key strategic points in Ankara and Istanbul. Speaking via Facetime, Erdogan urged the public to Go onto the streets and give them an answer.

Three hours later, Erdogan had returned from his holiday in Marmaris south-west Turkey and landed in Istanbul and the coup had effectively failed. Firat says she sat down at her computer the next day and was inundated with congratulatory messages on social media from all around the world, Arab countries, Greece, Europe, but especially from the Arab world.

She said users were calling her phone the freedom phone.

I got offers from businessmen and journalists who wanted to buy the phone. A Saudi businessman offered $250,000, she told Euronews in an interview with Euronews to mark the anniversary of the coup. Subsequent offers were even higher, she added.

In the end, Turkish businessmen called saying please do not sell this phone to others, we will buy it, lets discuss it. I said then, and I still keep saying, this phone is not to be sold. It may not have great material value but the symbolic value of this phone means a lot.

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'I was offered $250000 for Erdogan coup phone' - euronews

July 12, 2017 Athens, GreeceA satirical cover for a political news magazine was all it took to see its editor eventually sentenced to more than two decades in prison.

Cevheri Guven, editor in chief of Turkey's Nokta magazine, fled while out on bail late last year, smuggling his family out of a country he says is rapidly descending toward all-out dictatorship. He took refuge in Greece, where he applied for political asylum.

Mr. Guven is far from alone in feeling the full force of the Turkish government's wrath against press critical of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, particularly after last year's failed coup attempt. About 160 journalists are currently in jail, mostly on terrorism-related charges, while more than 150 media outlets, from broadcasters to newspapers and magazines, have been shut down, leaving thousands unemployed.

Mr. Erdogan bristles at accusations he is muzzling the press, saying authorities are simply rooting out criminals. He disputes figures from rights groups about the number of imprisoned journalists.

"There can be no question of limitless freedoms in the press. If the media abuses all kinds of freedoms to cause turmoil in the country or to cause provocations, then there is the judiciary for them, too," he said Wednesday, addressing foreign investor representatives in Istanbul. "The judiciary will work for them, too. Nowhere in the world can there be limitless freedoms. The West does the same to freedoms and its media members."

Asked at the end of last week's G20 meeting in Hamburg, Germany, about the media situation, Erdogan again insisted that those arrested had been detained for criminal activity.

"Journalists commit crimes, too, and when they do the judiciary makes the necessary assessment," he said. "I want you to know that those you know as being members of the press are mostly people who aided and abetted terror."

Pressure on Turkey's media is nothing new. Ranked 155th out of 180 countries in the 2017 World Press Freedom Index, Turkey fared only marginally worse than it had the previous year, when it was ranked at 151. Some journalists in prison today have been there for years.

"Turkey is the world leader in jailing journalists and has decimated the independent print media and cracked down heavily on news websites and social media," said Emma Sinclair-Webb, Turkey director for Human Rights Watch. Most of the journalists now imprisoned "have not yet been convicted of any crime but face trumped-up terrorism charges," she said.

Rights groups have criticized Turkey for decades for imprisoning journalists. The country has seen at least three coups, in 1960, 1971, and 1980, each leading to regimes that restricted the media in various ways. Guven's own troubles started with a September 2015 magazine cover, long before last year's July 15 coup attempt.

But, he says, the coup aftermath, with its state of emergency granting authorities sweeping powers, has plunged the country to new lows.

"There have been [bad times] in Turkey, in the junta years," Guven said, speaking through a translator from his temporary home in Greece. "But now is the worst time for journalists."

He says some of his colleagues have been released from detention by court order, only to be re-arrested outside the prison gates. Others are held in isolation, and are threatened with life sentences.

"This shows that there is no chance for journalists to be free in Turkey," he said. Guven himself has been sentenced to 22.5 years in prison for a variety of terrorist-related crimes, including making propaganda for both the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party and Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen, two groups that are hostile to each other. Erdogan blames Mr. Gulen, a former ally living in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania, for the coup.

The situation in Turkey, Guven said, "is obviously" going toward a dictatorship.

Rights groups say critical reporting has been all but silenced by the detentions and sackings, which have included the editor and top staff at Turkey's most respected opposition newspaper, Cumhuriyet.

"The crackdown on the media is not only about censoring critical reporting," said HRW's Sinclair-Webb, "but about preventing scrutiny of government policies and of the deeply repressive measures taken under the ongoing state of emergency."

For Guven, serious problems began with Nokta's satirical cover in September 2015 depicting a smiling Erdogan taking a selfie in front of a Turkish soldier's flag-draped coffin. It was strong criticism of the president's reported comments that soldiers killed fighting Kurdish militants would be happy for their martyrdom.

The result: Distribution of the magazine was banned and police raided its offices, accusing its leadership of insulting the president. In May, Guven's colleague Murat Capan was caught trying to flee to Greece and has been imprisoned in Turkey, also on a 22.5-year sentence. Greek media said Mr. Capan had made it across the Greek border but was pushed back into Turkey, where authorities detained him. The Greek government denies pushing back asylum seekers.

Activists say the media crackdown has fostered a climate of fear which has led to self-censorship.

"The fact that there are journalists in jail is not the only proof of the lack of press freedoms in Turkey. The censorship and self-censorship imposed on media organs also remove press freedoms," Gokhan Durmus, head of the Turkish Journalists' Syndicate, said in a speech on May 3, World Press Freedom Day. "In our country, which is governed under a state of emergency, journalism is being destroyed. They are trying to create a media with one voice, a Turkey with one voice."

The purge has affected almost every sector of Turkey's professional classes, from the judiciary and military to academia, hospitals, kindergartens, businesses, and diplomats. Human rights activists, including members of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, have been among the latest wave of detentions.

Anyone deemed to be linked to Gulen's network of schools, charities, and businesses has fallen under suspicion. About 150,000 people have been detained, one-third of them formally arrested; more than 100,000 have been fired, sometimes for links as tenuous as using a particular bank.

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Turkey's Erdogan says 'journalists commit crimes, too' - Christian Science Monitor

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President Erdogan tells BBC: EU wastes Turkey's time BBC News Turkey will find it "comforting" if the EU says it cannot be accepted as a member, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has told the BBC. Speaking to HARDtalk's Zeinab Badawi, he said Turkey was "able to stand on its own two feet". He also denied that the ... and more »

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President Erdogan tells BBC: EU wastes Turkey's time - BBC News