How to Lose an Election to Far-Right Populists

Anti-authoritarian opposition alliances are becoming one of the main strategies to reverse democratic backsliding, yet the social-psychological experiences of their supporters remain understudied. This study examines how activists and voters in Turkey made sense of the 2023 anti-government alliance and its electoral defeat under Erdoğan’s competitive authoritarian rule. Using semi-structured interviews (N = 16), we identify four recurrent strategic pitfalls: (a) the reliance on “abacus alliances” that prioritise electoral arithmetic over shared principles, fostering depoliticisation; (b) the experience of moral injury and alienation stemming from forced strategic voting; (c) the self-defeating nature of mimicking the incumbent’s nationalist repertoire, which normalises authoritarian norms; and (d) the institutional confinement of politics at the expense of grassroots mobilisation. These findings demonstrate that effective anti-authoritarian resistance requires distinct, principled identities and sustained collective action repertoires, rather than relying on negative partisanship or imitation, to successfully challenge populist incumbents.