Turkey is in political turmoil. For the past week, mass demonstrations have brought Istanbul and cities across the country to a near standstill. The anti-government protests came after police raided the home of Istanbul’s Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu at dawn on March 19 and arrested him, just days before his party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), was scheduled to hold their primary and name him as their challenger to Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the 2028 presidential election. Officials charged him with fiscal corruption and with abetting terrorism because he entered talks with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
The arrest came one day after Istanbul University rescinded Imamoglu’s degree, which he was awarded in 1990. This was widely perceived as a political move to block him from standing as a candidate for the presidency, since the Turkish constitution requires that the president possess a university degree.
These two events sparked massive protests. In Istanbul, university students led the demonstrations, drawing people of all ages and walks of life to the streets on a scale unseen since the 2013 Gezi Park protests. The demonstrators seemed to be galvanized by the size of the crowds, which continued to expand despite repressive government policies that essentially criminalized public protests.
Imamoglu was first elected mayor in 2019, in a landslide victory that analysts and commentators presented as a rebuke to Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP). At 53, he is relatively young and a popular mayor, broadly perceived as an effective leader of Turkey’s largest city, with its population of 16 million, at a time of spiking inflation and a precipitous rise in the cost of living. Having won two elections against the mayoral candidate for the AKP, on March 23 Imamoglu’s CHP selected him as the party’s candidate for the next presidential election, which will be held in 2028. He is a significant challenger to Erdogan, who has been in power since 2003, first as prime minister and then as president.
News of Imamoglu’s arrest triggered long-suppressed frustration with the ruling party’s increasingly authoritarian policies, with the demonstrations underpinned by a sense of “nothing left to lose.”
While the CHP slammed the mayor’s arrest as a “civilian coup,” an abrogation of the rule of law and the people’s will, Imamoglu, in a handwritten statement that was photographed and posted to his personal account on X as police were taking him away, wrote that the Turkish people would respond to the “conspiracies, traps and lies” leveled against him. He added: “I entrust myself first to God, then to our nation.”
The student-led protests expanded rapidly, joined by people from all age groups who carried Turkish flags and held banners that bore slogans ranging from angry to comic. Some bore quotes from Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the modern, secular state of Turkey, while others were emblazoned with the title of Bertolt Brecht’s famous poem “All of Us or None” — a slogan that the CHP and the mayor alike have been using to rally the support of voters struggling to make ends meet while Turkey’s inflation rate approaches 80%.
Riot police swiftly barricaded central locations, and then deployed in the narrow side streets of the historic peninsula, where Istanbul University is located. The first group of protesters wanted to walk to Taksim Square, the central gathering spot of Istanbul’s political demonstrations, but police surrounded the square, wearing helmets and carrying riot shields, and pushed people back.
Ozgur Ozel, the chair of the CHP, intervened with a call to action, inviting supporters to the party’s branch offices around the city. “Sovereignty belongs unconditionally to the people,” he said, quoting Ataturk, who founded the CHP.
The call worked. Instead of Taksim Square, the main gathering place became the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality Headquarters, or Sarachane in Turkish. In a matter of hours, tens of thousands gathered in front of the historic building, where Ozel gave a speech in which he described Imamoglu as the “next president of Turkey.”
The Istanbul Governor’s Office quickly declared a ban on protests, closing down the metro and bus stations, but the crowds continued to grow. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of supporters gathered in the capital city of Ankara. By Thursday protests had spread throughout the country to dozens of Turkey’s cities and towns. There were protests in the Black Sea province of Rize, an Erdogan stronghold where the president’s family has its roots, and in Trabzon, Imamoglu’s ancestral home.
At universities across the country, students organized to resist riot police who waded into demonstrations using tear gas, rubber pellets and water cannons.
On Friday, Erdogan said that “Turkey will not be a victim to street terror.” In response, Istanbul saw its biggest demonstration thus far. There was almost no room to stand in front of the Sarachane, which Imamoglu had asked citizens to protect.
“I’m here to end this madness,” Can Gumusel, a 27-year-old private sector worker, told New Lines. “They have been controlling our lives for the past 20-25 years, and took everything from us. Now, they are after our souls.”
Ahmet Tekinoglu, a 22-year-old student at Istanbul University State Conservatory, said: “We are not here to support a political figure directly, but we represent a soul. We are guarding the lawful republic entrusted to us by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.” Tekinoglu told New Lines that the AKP had “wrecked” the economy. When the party first came to power in 2003, ordinary citizens could afford university tuition for their children, a home and a car, he said. Now, with soaring inflation and an astronomically high cost of living, this was no longer the case. He hoped the government would be ousted as soon as possible.
Standing in front of the Sarachane, hundreds of thousands listened to politicians give speeches while standing on the roof of a bus. A few hundred yards away, by the Roman aqueduct, tensions were increasing as angry demonstrators insisted on walking to Taksim Square, only to be met by a wall of riot police officers who tried to disperse them with pepper spray, rubber bullets and water cannons. As the night went on, the police became more violent; hundreds of young people sought medical help for their burning eyes and faces.
“Come!” said one young man, his face covered. He yelled at the crowds, who looked ready to head toward the wall of police. “Come! If you don’t come now, when will you? If you don’t come now, who will?”
In an echo of the 2013 Gezi Park protests, police sprayed water canons at whirling dervishes wearing gas masks, activists read from books like Rousseau’s “The Social Contract” and lovers took advantage of short lulls in the violence to take photos of one another against the background of helmeted riot police holding shields and lined up for battle. The protesters seemed to be galvanized by the feeling of having broken through the barrier of fear.
On Saturday, as Imamoglu was arraigned in court on charges of abetting terror and corruption, hundreds of supporters stood in the cold outside Istanbul’s Palace of Justice, which was encircled by hundreds of riot police. Lawyers wearing their legal robes made up a significant portion of the supporters; they even joined the people pushing the barricades and brawling with the police. “We should be allowed inside. But the government is trampling on the rule of law,” a 30-year-old lawyer told New Lines. He withheld his name because he is a public servant. “I’m here today to stand up for the people’s right to elect and be elected. I’m here for our democracy. This is a point of no return,” he said.
The frustrated crowd chanted slogan after slogan, all in near synchrony. “The day will come, the tables will turn. The AKP will be held accountable to the people! Turkey is secular and will remain secular!” The chants reflected fears that the 102-year-old secular republic of Turkey was becoming a modern theocratic state powered by centralized corruption around one man — Erdogan.
The court remanded Imamoglu on charges of corruption but declined to accept the charge of abetting terrorism. If the judge had allowed that charge to stand, the government could have installed a trustee to govern Istanbul.
Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands had defied government-imposed travel bans that placed severe restrictions on movement in and out of Istanbul. They streamed into the city to gather at the Sarachane, which had become the main gathering point for the demonstrators, to protect it from the threat of a government-imposed trustee.
“Dictator Erdogan!” The crowds yelled at the riot police, whom they saw as protectors of the current government. Chants last heard at the Gezi Park protests were revived. Loud shouts of “Jump, or you’re an Erdogan supporter!” and “Taksim is everywhere!” rose from the crowds of demonstrators.
Police beat up journalists, including correspondents for Agence France-Presse and Reuters, even after they identified themselves and showed their press credentials.
NetBlocks, the global internet censorship watchdog, confirmed that all the major social media and messaging platforms — WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, X, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok — had been subjected to internet throttling, making them difficult to access and slow to use. The chair of RTUK, the Turkish state agency for regulating television and radio broadcasts, threatened in a written statement to revoke the license of any broadcaster airing “statements from illegal organizations.”
Amnesty International published a statement that quoted Dinushka Dissanayake, deputy regional director for Europe: “Today’s draconian actions represent a massive escalation in Turkish authorities’ ongoing crackdown on peaceful dissent and targeting of the main political opposition party.”
“We have had it up to here,” a 67-year-old woman living in Istanbul’s central Sisli district told New Lines. She was on her way to cast her vote in the CHP presidential primaries on Sunday, hours after the borough’s mayor from the CHP was removed from office by court order, potentially to be replaced with a trustee, against the will of the people. “Everything is getting harder by the day. We are not happy at all. We are here for ourselves, for the slaughtered stray animals, for the wrecked environment,” she said, while holding the leash of her tiny rescue dog. The “massacre law” refers to a new government policy, implemented last summer, that allows municipalities to kill stray animals. Istanbul is famous for the uniquely warm relationship between its human residents, feral cats and stray dogs, as seen in the critically acclaimed documentary films “Stray” and “Kedi.”
Long lines of voters waiting to cast their ballots in the CHP primaries showed that the angry dog lover was not alone. The lines snaked along narrow and wide streets for hundreds of yards. Across Turkey, Imamoglu supporters headed to the polls.
Local television news programs broadcast clips that showed women in their 90s walking slowly to cast their ballots and interviews with former AKP supporters who said it was now impossible for them to accept an injustice on the scale of Imamoglu’s arrest.
By evening, with 14 million votes counted, the CHP announced that Imamoglu was the party’s candidate for the 2028 presidential election.
That evening, CHP Chair Ozel addressed supporters gathered in front of the Sarachane, telling them that they numbered 1 million. But toward midnight, after the speeches ended, riot police waded into the crowd and unleashed the biggest wave of violence so far. They chased people who were leaving the demonstration and walking toward the nearest metro station. “I told the police officer that we were leaving,” a 25-year-old advertiser named Naz told New Lines. “I begged her to let me go, but she sprayed me in my eyes.” The police officer’s eyes, said Naz, “looked full of rage like black holes.”
Naz said the police deliberately tripped her and her friends so that they fell to the ground, then kicked them and fired hard rubber pellets at their legs.
Dozens of shoes lay abandoned in front of the park by the Sarachane, left behind by the demonstrators as they ran from the police. Social media videos showed people who had been arrested lying on the street, their hands cuffed behind their backs.
At dawn on Monday, police arrested 10 prominent journalists at their homes and took them to police headquarters. The Journalists’ Union of Turkey issued a statement that called on the government to end its policies of “oppression and silencing of journalists.”
On Monday evening, the Ministry of Interior announced that police had detained more than 1,133 people, including journalists, at the ongoing demonstrations.
On Tuesday morning the police took all the detainees, including the journalists they had arrested at home, to the courthouse for arraignment. The prosecutor’s office initially told defense lawyers that the detained people would be released under judicial control, meaning they would be allowed to go home but were subject to rearrest. But as families and colleagues waited anxiously in front of the courthouse, the prosecutors abruptly changed their minds and decided to request that the court issue arrest warrants. As of the time of writing the judge was still weighing the request, but at least one arrest warrant, for AFP photojournalist Yasin Akgul, had been issued. Whether this means the journalists will go to jail is a question the court has not yet decided. But this is a possibility, in which case ostensibly democratic Turkey would be criminalizing photojournalists for doing their job.
Dozens of supporters waited behind a security barrier in the corridor outside the courtroom while the prosecutor and the defense presented their arguments to the judge. They applauded when they saw the journalists and the detained demonstrators, who shouted back: “Taksim is everywhere! Resistance is everywhere!” Many of the onlookers were in tears, while others expressed anger.
Meanwhile, Erdogan’s repressive measures have scared off foreign investors and further destabilized the already shaky economy. The Financial Times reports that the Turkish Central Bank has spent $12 billion to prop up the lira, while the stock market saw its worst day of trading since the 2008 global financial crisis. The precipitous decline in the lira’s value against the dollar only adds weight to the already heavy financial burden borne by average Turks as they struggle to make ends meet.
Yet while journalists continued to do their jobs in defiance of government threats and restrictions, Turkish artists, for the most part, remained silent and absent from the demonstrations. On a wall in Istanbul, someone graffitied: “We will eat the apolitical artists and the rich when the time comes to cancel culture.”
The protests continue to grow, while Imamoglu and his aides remain in prison. On Monday evening, Ozel, the CHP leader, stood in front of the Sarachane and called upon the opposition protesters to boycott both pro-government media and a list of pro-government businesses, including those that produce various brands of popular consumer goods. “Whether we can turn this into a turning point or another chapter for our democracy, we will see,” said Mehmet, a 50-year-old white-collar employee who told New Lines he didn’t want his surname published. “But one thing is certain: the voices in the streets insist on being heard.”
“Spotlight” is a newsletter about underreported cultural trends and news from around the world, emailed to subscribers twice a week. Sign up here.