Name: Turkey update: Protesters in Turkey clash with police over arrest of Istanbul mayor | DW News
Uploaded: 2025-03-21T21:01:10.000Z
Duration: 5 min 39 s
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Thousands of people in Turkey are defying a ban on gatherings to protest the arrest of Istanbul's mayor.

Police have fired tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse demonstrators in Turkey's biggest city.

Ekrem İmamoğlu was taken into custody on Wednesday on charges of corruption and aiding a terrorist group.

But the opposition says his arrest is politically motivated as he's considered the top challenger to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Erdoğan has dismissed the accusation as theatrics.

For more, let's speak to Gönül Tol, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington, D.C.

Good to have you with us. What's behind the timing of this arrest?

Well, the main opposition party, the CHP, which Erdoğan, Ekrem İmamoğlu belongs to, is set to hold its presidential primaries on Sunday.

And the frontrunner is Ekrem İmamoğlu. So that's one of the reasons.

And the second reason is Erdoğan doesn't just want to block him from running for presidency in 2028.

He also wants to recapture Istanbul. Istanbul is Turkey's largest city and its economic powerhouse with lots of resources.

And when Erdoğan was the mayor of the city, it really helped him.

And later in his tenure, the city and its large resources helped Erdoğan build his clientelistic network.

So recapturing those resources at a time when Turkish economy is really struggling ahead of 2028 elections is critical for Erdoğan.

As you mentioned, the elections are in 2028. But what does this all tell us about the current state of the political climate?

Well, it's very repressive. There is no rule of law. Courts are highly controlled by President Erdoğan.

And it is a country textbook case of what political scientists call a competitive authoritarian regime, where there are elections, political parties are legal, and the competition is legal.

But the incumbent changes the rule of the game and has so much resources and controls bureaucracy that the electoral competition is not fair.

But with this decision, the recent decision to arrest his top rival, I think Erdoğan is trying to shift Turkey's competitive authoritarian regime into a Putin-style full-fledged autocracy.

And we've seen this outpouring of support, the protesters coming out to the streets, defying the ban on demonstrations.

What do you see coming out of this? Could this backfire against President Erdoğan?

It could, and it did before. If you remember, in 2019 municipal elections, and that was the first time when Ekrem İmamoğlu won the mayorship,

Erdoğan did not accept the results and called for a rerun. And in the first round of elections, Ekrem İmamoğlu had won the mayorship by a thin minority.

And in the second round, people got really frustrated with Erdoğan's decision, thinking that this was using his powers to undermine democracy.

So more people went to the ballot, and Ekrem İmamoğlu ended up winning by even a bigger margin.

So that tells us that these things can backfire. But this is not 2019. Turkey of 2025 is a country where repression is a lot stronger.

Today, thousands of people are on the streets. And if you look at Turkey's history of popular protests, in 2013, again, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in protest of Erdoğan's policies.

But since then, Erdoğan has made sure that these large-scale protests do not happen. So right now the protests are taking place, but these people are taking a huge risk.

And are these protests the only tool or form of leverage the opposition has, or are they responding in other ways?

No, pretty much street protests I see as the only tool available to the main opposition party, because we are talking about a country where there is no rule of law.

And the rules of the game can be changed on an autocrat's whim. So there is not that much that the opposition party can do in terms of they cannot go to the courts, they cannot use the legal framework.

The media is under Erdoğan's control. So one of the very few places that opposition parties control in terms of media outlets, they have to be very careful because they constantly face fines.

So street protests, that's why, is one of the very few options available to both the political opposition and the popular opposition.

Okay, Gönül Tol, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington, D.C. We appreciate your time and your insights. Thank you.

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Turkey update: Protesters in Turkey clash with police over arrest of Istanbul mayor | DW News

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