Supporters of the imprisoned mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoglu, say millions have rallied to protest against his arrest on corruption charges. There are no official numbers, but observers say these are the largest antigovernment protests in a decade.
Imamoglu faces multiple charges, including “establishing and managing a criminal organisation, taking bribes, extortion, unlawfully recording personal data and rigging a tender”. He has denied the charges.
Turkiye’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says anyone accused of a crime must be tried in the courts and that the “movement of violence” on the streets will not work.
Ozgur Ozel, the leader of the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), is encouraging the protests and has launched a petition to demand Imamoglu’s release and an early presidential election.
What is Imamoglu’s appeal?
Imamoglu was widely expected to run for president in 2028, but his imprisonment – and the cancellation of his university degree days earlier – would technically rule him out.
But the CHP nominated him as its presidential candidate anyway on March 23.
In 2019, during his campaign for mayor, Imamoglu ran a low-key campaign even when he was forced to rerun the race after the governing Justice and Development Party, or AK Party, candidate disputed the results.
Since taking office, he has been credited with improvements to Istanbul’s infrastructure, social services, and cultural heritage.
“Some of his appeal boils down to his personality: warm, friendly, articulate, accessible. He’s also not divisive, which is rare in Turkish politics at this stage,” Ziya Meral, a lecturer in international studies at SOAS, University of London, said.
Imamoglu emerged on the stage of a city that is the “microcosm of Turkish identity politics”, Burcu Ozcelik of the Royal United Services Institute told Al Jazeera, adding that nowhere else in the country is competition as fierce.
As such, the protests are in response to “the perceived injustice of jailing a democratically elected mayor who has a track record of being a ‘man of the people’”, Ozcelik said in emailed comments.
What did Erdogan say?
Erdogan has denied that the charges against Imamoglu are politically motivated.
He has previously accused Imamoglu of being a pawn of foreign interests and has dismissed the Istanbul mayor’s past legal difficulties as beneath him.
The president has called the current wave of protests “a movement of violence” and accused the CHP leadership of “shielding those who attack police with stones and axes”, pointing to more than 100 police officers injured so far in the rallies.
“Courts held those accountable who committed treason against the national will, and will do so in the future,” he said.
“The judiciary will hold those behind any sabotage against the Turkish economy and the wellbeing of the nation accountable.”
Justice Minister Yilmaz Tunc has defended the independence of the judiciary against accusations of political bias, saying Erdogan did not influence Imamoglu’s arrest.
What has the CHP said?
The party has slammed the accusations against Imamoglu, saying they are politically motivated and aim to remove him from the presidential race.
In addition to encouraging rallies, Ozel has previously called for a boycott of products and services from companies thought to be close to the AK Party, an initiative Erdogan has condemned as economic “sabotage”.
On Wednesday, Ozel picked up on calls among Imamoglu’s supporters for a one-day shopping ban, writing on social media at the end: “We all saw what state the junta alliance against us fell into in panic. Those who could not go out for years had to go out in a hurry and see the state of the poor nation.”
“The real reason Ekrem Imamoglu is in custody … [is] because he’s already managed to thrash his opponents at the ballot box four different times,” Imamoglu’s wife Dilek said in a video podcast.
“They’ve detained hundreds of our children, thousands of our youths,” Ozel told protesters in Istanbul, “They only had one goal in mind: to intimidate them … make sure they never go out again.”
So does everyone like Imamoglu?
While Imamoglu has been praised for introducing measures to improve Istanbul’s infrastructure, social services, and cultural heritage, he has faced criticism as well.
In 2019, he was heavily criticised for not having prepared the city better for forecast floods. Imamoglu faced further criticism the following year when he briefly visited the earthquake-hit city of Elazig in the Eastern Anatolia province, before departing for a skiing holiday with his family.
A profile in the pro-government Daily Sabah in February detailing Imamoglu’s long battles with the judiciary described a “political trajectory … stained with criticism over his governance” of Turkiye’s most populated city.
In July 2020, an audit of the Istanbul Municipality pointed to what the mayor’s critics called excessive spending in contrast to past pledges to keep prices low and cut municipal overspending.
He has been subject to official inquiries into everything from tender rigging to attempting to influence the judiciary, some of which were still ongoing at the time of his arrest.
Why doesn’t the CHP just pick another presidential candidate?
They have not said, but they seem determined to stand by him.
He won Istanbul in 2019, breaking the AK Party’s 25-year hold on the city where Erdogan first rose to national fame and about which he said in 2019: “If we lose Istanbul, we lose Turkiye.”
In last year’s local elections, Imamoglu and the CHP were able to flip several districts that the AK Party had come to regard as theirs.
He is a practising Muslim, which the CHP, a secular party, believes widens its appeal among more conservative voters.
The CHP may also be betting on Imamoglu’s political trajectory and life continuing to resemble Erdogan’s, as many analysts have pointed out.
Are Imamoglu and Erdogan’s lives that similar?
There are similarities.
Both have familial ties to Turkiye’s Black Sea region.
Both served as mayors of Istanbul, Erdogan from 1994 to 1998 and Imamoglu until his arrest on corruption charges.
Like Imamoglu, Erdogan spent time in prison during his time in office – four months of a 10-month sentence – and was banned from politics for a while for reading a poem in September 1998 that was found to be anti-Republican by the secular state.
Both even have football links. Imamoglu was an amateur player and is still a vocal supporter of his local team, Trabzonspor, while Erdogan briefly played for the team Camialtıspor FC as a semi-professional.
“Erdogan himself began his national political career first as a mayor of Istanbul and had publicly stated that whoever wins in Istanbul will win the national elections,” Meral said, adding that that prediction had proved true for Erdogan many years ago.