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2 days ago
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Since the arrest earlier this month of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s main political rival, Istanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, on what are clearly trumped-up charges of corruption and terrorism, Taksim Square, the city’s biggest tourist site and hub of political protest, has been lying empty, cordoned off by police. In my 50 years living in Istanbul, I have not seen as many so-called security measures on the streets as I have over the past few days.
Taksim’s metro station and many of the city’s other busiest stations have been closed. The regional government has restricted car and intercity bus access to Istanbul. The police are checking incoming vehicles, and anyone suspected of travelling to the city to protest is turned away. Here and all over the country, televisions are permanently switched on so people can follow the latest distressing political developments. For the past week, the Istanbul governor’s office has banned public protests and political demonstrations – rights enshrined in the constitution. Yet spontaneous unauthorised protests and clashes with the police have continued unabated, even though internet access has been restricted in an attempt to prevent gatherings. The police use teargas ruthlessly and have arrested countless people.
We wonder how such outrageous things could happen in a country that is a member of Nato and angling for EU membership. While the world is preoccupied with Donald Trump, with the wars between Palestine and Israel, Ukraine and Russia, what little remains of Turkish democracy now fights for its life.
The jailing of the president’s chief rival, a politician capable of gaining mass support, brings Erdoğan’s strong-fisted, autocratic rule to a level we have not seen before. İmamoğlu’s arrest came a mere few days before Turkey’s main opposition party was expected to formally nominate him as its presidential candidate during a primary. People for or against the government now largely agree on one thing: Erdoğan sees İmamoğlu as a political threat and wants to get rid of him.
İmamoğlu has won more votes than Erdoğan’s own party, the Justice and Development party, in Istanbul’s last three mayoral elections. When İmamoğlu defeated the party’s candidate in the April 2019 election, Erdoğan had the result annulled, citing technical irregularities. The elections were repeated two months later. İmamoğlu won again. Even more, he increased his margin. At the next round of local elections in 2024, after five years in office, İmamoğlu once again defeated Erdoğan’s party candidate and was elected mayor of Istanbul for the third time. İmamoğlu’s electoral track record and his growing popularity have made him the main opposition candidate who could successfully challenge Erdoğan at the next presidential election.
The flip side to all this is that Erdoğan seems to be using the same playbook on his opponent as the one used on him 27 years ago. In 1998, Erdoğan was Istanbul’s elected mayor and a popular figure. The secular and military establishment deemed his brand of political Islam dangerous. He was also imprisoned and charged (in his case it was for inciting religious hatred after reciting a political poem at a rally). Erdoğan was removed as mayor and spent four months in prison.
But his imprisonment and his defiant refusal to collaborate with the establishment and bow down to the repressive demands of the army helped further raise his political profile. As some commentators have pointed out, the jailing of İmamoğlu, who has denied the charges and is also promising not “to bow down”, might actually have the same unintended outcome. It could very well be helping to make the mayor all the more popular.
Yet the situation isn’t quite the same. İmamoğlu is facing a deliberate and determined attempt to remove him from the running. The day before police were dispatched to İmamoğlu’s house, the pro-Erdoğan press and the Erdoğan-appointed rector of the University of Istanbul declared İmamoğlu’s college degree invalid, citing alleged irregularities in his transfer from a private university. Since only university graduates are allowed to run for president in Turkey, this would disqualify İmamoğlu, who has said he planned to challenge the decision. The accusations of corruption and terrorism followed.
The labelling of political opponents as terrorists is a tendency the Erdoğan government acquired after the failed military coup of 2016, when a faction of the Turkish armed forces tried to take over. In 2019, when the Austrian author Peter Handke, who had been criticised for backing the late Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, was awarded the Nobel prize in literature, Erdoğan sternly opposed the decision. Caught unprepared and without a teleprompter, he declared that they gave the same prize to “a terrorist from Turkey!”, in apparent reference to my Nobel win in 2006. I had been due to fly back from New York to Istanbul that day, and I was just about to cancel my return when the president’s spokesperson announced that it wasn’t me the president had been referring to.
A court steered by Erdoğan has now jailed İmamoğlu under corruption charges, but it did not press “terror” charges. Such a charge would have allowed President Erdoğan to install his preferred candidate in the role of mayor of Istanbul – a position his party has failed to win for three consecutive elections – and thus, some fear, he would be able to redirect some of the city’s endless stream of tax income into publicity and propaganda activities for his own party.
In jailing İmamoğlu, Erdoğan doesn’t just sideline a more popular political rival – he also seeks to get his hands back on a wealth of resources he hasn’t been able to touch for seven years. Should he succeed, the next presidential election will feature only Erdoğan and his candidates’ faces plastered over the city’s walls and illuminated municipal billboards.
This is not a surprise for anybody who’s following Turkish politics closely. For the past decade, Turkey hasn’t been a real democracy – merely an electoral democracy, one where you can vote for your preferred candidate but have no freedom of speech or thought. Indeed, the Turkish state has strived to coerce its people into uniformity. Nobody is even talking about the many journalists and civil servants who have been arbitrarily jailed over the past few days, either in an attempt to add heft and credibility to the corruption charges against İmamoğlu or on the assumption that no one will pay attention with everything else going on.
Now, with the arrest of the country’s most popular politician – the candidate who would have won a majority of votes at the next round of national elections – even this limited form of democracy is coming to an end. This is unacceptable and distressing, and that’s why more and more people are joining the latest protests. For the time being, no one can foresee what will happen next.
