Many political observers agree that contemporary Turkey’s regime has changed, but there is little consensus on what this new regime is. Is it an executive presidentialism or an elective autocracy? Is it a form of competitive authoritarianism or simply an illiberal democracy? The complexity of the diagnosis is exacerbated by the deployment of populist techniques, which have cultivated the power of the President’s office at the expense of the parliament even prior to the constitutional referendum and especially during the state of emergency following the failed coup of 2016. This paper focuses on one of the main instruments wielded by President Erdogan, the muhtar conventions he held at the Presidential Palace (2015-2018), in building the new regime. In a series of almost fifty meetings, President Erdogan hosted thousands of muhtars, who are the most local, lowest ranking elected officials at the level of villages and urban neighborhoods from around the country. During these visits, Erdogan gave them fiery speeches about the state of the country, focusing on how its security is threatened by a multiplicity of domestic and external actors. This paper analyzes the transcripts of those speeches to show the ways in which populism helped forge a new alliance between the most local, most popular seats of political representation and the highest national office of the land. I examine how the muhtars were fashioned into a form of popular power alternative to that expressed both through parliamentary political representation and by the direct presence of people on the streets. If the muhtars thus participated in the bottom-up constitution of the new regime, I argue, supporting AKP’s self-representation as a democratizing and ultimately constituent force, their alliance also domesticated them into an arm of the securitarian state.