Scholars argue that Turkey has been experiencing a democratic backsliding since 2010 under the leadership of Erdogan and the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and has become a competitive authoritarian regime in the mid-2010s (Ozbudun 2015; Oktem&Akkoyunlu 2016; Esen&Gumuscu 2016; Yesil 2018; Caliskan 2018). This new regime of Erdogan’s Turkey, like its counterparts all around the world, combines competitive elections at national and subnational levels with authoritarian tactics designed to manipulate the electoral landscape, ensuring the triumph of autocratic incumbents (Schedler, 2009; Levitsky and Way, 2010; Bermeo, 2016; Waldner and Lust, 2018). This strategic combination allows Erdogan to solidify his control over executive offices and public resources. However, much of Erdogan’s dominance has been territorially uneven and mostly limited to the national level. At the subnational level, despite attracting most of the voters, Erdogan and AKP could not always win all the subnational executive offices, providing the opposition parties with the opportunity to govern a territory within a nationally authoritarian context, and since 2019, the main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP) governs the three largest cities, Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir. Even though the opposition parties frequently take advantage of competitive elections at the subnational level also in other similar regime contexts, existing studies have offered limited insights into opposition-led subnational offices. This paper aims to explore the characteristics of such opposition-led subnational executive offices, which I will term opposition pockets, examining the variations among them, and evaluating their impact on the opposition’s struggle against the national-level autocratic incumbent. I argue that opposition pockets vary in terms of the timing of their emergence, the treatment they receive from the autocratic incumbent, and their performance in governance. These variations, in turn, shape the opposition’s capacity to transform their offices into channels of confrontation, ultimately influencing the national-level struggle against the autocratic incumbent. To support these arguments, I conducted 12 months of fieldwork in Turkey where I collected administrative data, examined archival resources and public opinion surveys, and conducted in-depth interviews with politicians. By analyzing the opposition pockets in Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir, the three largest cities, and Diyarbakir, the largest city in the Kurdish region, the paper sheds light on the dynamics between opposition parties and autocratic incumbents at both sub-national and national levels and contributes to our understanding of how variations in these pockets impact the opposition's capacity to generate new channels to challenge the autocratic incumbent.