Istanbulites will not forget 19 March 2025. That Wednesday became instantly infamous when hundreds of heavily armed police detained Istanbul’s charismatic mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, in his home shortly after 7am. News of his arrest triggered a wave of fear across the city. Before he was thrown into a cell in the notorious Marmara Prison, İmamoğlu filmed a last-minute video. From inside his walk-in closet, he spoke out against autocracy and entrusted his “fate” to his “people”. Fixing his tie, the immaculately dressed politician seemed as if he was readying to accept his candidacy as Turkey’s next president. In fact, the mayor was on his way to the police van. The video, titled “A Coup against People’s Will”, garnered 28 million views in less than a week.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has ruled Turkey since 2003, swiftly mobilised his state powers against İmamoğlu, his top rival for the 2028 presidential elections, and the mayor’s allies. Erdoğan’s loyalists, appointed to bureaucracy due to their fealty, arrested another 100 prominent figures from İmamoğlu’s Republican People’s Party (CHP) – city planners, campaign organisers, professors, pollsters, political scientists, DJs and others – in a matter of a few hours. Turkey’s Communication Technologies Authority efficiently throttled the internet. Across the country, users couldn’t send WhatsApp messages, watch YouTube videos, or post Instagram stories. Only Netflix and other entertainment services were spared. I spent the day watching Churchill at War in startled sadness.
This isn’t the Turkish state’s first attempt to silence Istanbul’s increasingly popular leader. When he was first elected Istanbul’s mayor in March 2019, the Supreme Election Council annulled that year’s local elections. Officials from Erdoğan’s governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) claimed “something had happened” during the ballot count. Voters wouldn’t hear of it. In the rerun, İmamoğlu dramatically increased his margin of victory. Erdoğan was forced to acknowledge the result. But it now seems he never accepted it.
Last year’s local elections proved İmamoğlu’s continued standing as a politician with a national appeal. His 51 per cent of votes – 11 percentage points higher than the AKP candidate, despite limitless state support – was met with shock in Ankara. Here was a president in the making, maintaining his support despite government-controlled media attacks, and emerging as a strong, potential candidate for the next presidential elections in 2028.
That İmamoğlu was detained almost precisely on the anniversary of his electoral triumph is significant. In the AKP campaign, Erdoğan’s allies mocked İmamoğlu’s social democratic policies. Aimed at fighting inequality and poverty, his agenda was one of “socialist municipalism”. The success of that agenda seems to have led to the mayor’s downfall. From delivering eight litres of milk per month to 156,000 children in 2023 (a policy known as “People’s Milk”), monitoring domestic violence, offering municipal daycare centres free of charge, and providing 10 per cent of Istanbul’s bread demand with quality bread at 2,830 locations throughout the city (“People’s Bread”), İmamoğlu ensured that the state supported residents. His policies allowed Istanbulites to feel Scandinavian for a change. Ankara permitted that for a half-decade before it grew impatient.
Perhaps it was the success of İmamoğlu’s “City Restaurants” scheme that prompted Erdoğan to act. In the designated restaurants throughout Istanbul, people could buy a bowl of soup, a main course, rice or pasta, fruit or yogurt, bread, and water for £0.81. When Turkey’s leading food critic, Vedat Milör, praised the quality of food in City Restaurants in January, the government launched an investigation against him.
Affordable, high-quality social services undermine AKP’s neoliberal, dog-eat-dog ideology. They threaten the government’s “New Turkey” vision, whose central axiom is that secular society doesn’t exist and that only Islamic networks can provide social safety nets. Once a group of unelected bureaucrats took control of the city’s Şişli neighbourhood in the wake of İmamoğlu’s arrest, the City Restaurants ceased operations. A sign was placed on the door when I visited one a few days ago, which read: “The AKP has confiscated the bread of the people!” (The government denied closing the restaurants, citing “supply issues” behind their lack of service.)
The five-year shift from “New Turkey” to CHP’s social democratic vision clearly terrified Turkey’s military-industrial complex, which was built patiently in the wake of a military coup on 12 September 1980. Turkey wants to be a global player with its defence industries, and the country’s captains of industry consider prioritising social spending an impediment to that objective. The assault on the mayor’s network and ideology is calculated to diminish leftist political projects for the foreseeable future.
İmamoğlu’s current plight echoes Erdoğan’s political trajectory. In 1998, Turkey’s secular establishment threw Erdoğan, then a beloved mayor of Istanbul, into jail. Spectacular scenes accompanied Erdoğan’s arrest: tens of thousands gathered to see him off. After four months behind bars, he emerged from his cell as the most significant political leader in a country in deep economic and political turmoil. By jailing İmamoğlu on corruption charges with similar optics – but for a more extended period, at least for months before his trial begins – the AKP risks gifting the same hero’s journey arc to the most significant rival of Erdoğan’s career.
[See also: How the OBR became the Department for Austerity]
A cost-of-living crisis and a growing desire for global integration have greatly empowered İmamoğlu’s CHP, established by the country’s Westernising founder, Atatürk, in 1923. The party’s uncharismatic leader, Özgür Özel, has effectively managed the protests that raged across the country following İmamoğlu’s arrest. Gathering crowds outside the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality building, Özel delivered pointed speeches for seven consecutive nights, attracting hundreds of thousands of attendees. On the day of İmamoğlu’s arrest, Özel also organised a symbolic primary election: some 15 million people voted in a mass show of support for the newly deposed mayor.
Özel knew when to stop. He called off the protests on Laylat al-Qadr, or Night of Power, 26 March, a commemoration of the night when the angel Gabriel revealed the Koran’s first verses to the Islamic prophet Muhammad. This move effectively countered the government-controlled media’s demonisation of protests as part of an ominous atheist plot.
It’s difficult to predict what will happen next for Turkey. People are full of fear. The following day, over the course of 24 hours, the country’s leading opposition television channel, Sözcü, was shut down; Taksim metro station, a central hub of Istanbul’s transportation system, was closed; and hundreds of protesters, activists and journalists were detained in dawn raids. There is a dizzying sense that anything could happen to anyone that envelops the country. In an essay published on 28 March, Turkey’s Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk described this as the moment when Turkey’s “limited democracy is coming to an end” 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.”
In the past few days, I watched as friends and families of some detained activists – whose total number reached 260 – tried to conceal the news that they were awaiting trial. People want to protect their loved ones from purges that may follow. Despite such dark prospects, I also found some consolation in the events. Even if Istanbulites didn’t get the results they wanted from their protests, they actualised something in the process – their ability to come together and be politically active. This must have instilled some fear in the heart of a selfish establishment. In On Revolution, Hannah Arendt has called this collective meeting of individuals “public happiness”. Political engagement itself then becomes an end, filling participants with a particular, political form of joy.
Those who watched 2013’s Occupy Wall Street-style Gezi Park protests may recall the waves of prosecution that followed a similar “happiness”. The same pattern may emerge in the coming days. By the night of 27 March, police had detained 1,879 people, using facial recognition technology to identify some protesters. The government also announced 11 new prison complexes to be built by 2027, with a combined space of 703,974 square metres.
Some optimists believe autocracy is doomed because it’s unsustainable. Turkey proves that argument wrong. Even after Turkey’s central bank spent $27bn of its reserves to support the national currency in the political turbulence of the past week, the economy appears to have stabilised. Bloomberg wrote that Turkey’s president is “succeeding” in his efforts “to contain a rout in financial markets, even as he turns the screws on opponents”.
Even if he does escape a sentence, a technicality may end up deciding İmamoğlu’s political fate. Hours before his arrest on 19 March, İmamoğlu’s alma mater, Istanbul University, under pressure from the government, cancelled the mayor’s college diploma from 1994. Without a university degree and only a high school diploma, İmamoğlu is technically deemed unfit to run for the presidency or any other high office.
Two conflicting truths will define Turkey’s future course. İmamoğlu supporters believe he’s innocent and want to see him in the presidential seat. The Turkish state hides behind its constitution as it pronounces the mayor ineligible as a presidential candidate. Turks love a political underdog. Yet fighting for an underdog for a week is not the same as fighting for him through years of sustained state opposition. It’s not clear if Turks love İmamoğlu enough to support him for four long years.
[See also: Putin’s endgame]
Content from our partners
