ISTANBUL — Before dawn on Wednesday, Turkish police detained Ekrem İmamoğlu, the mayor of Istanbul and the man most polls described as the only politician in the country capable of beating President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. By the weekend he was in Marmara Prison, formally arrested on corruption charges — the terrorism file notably set aside — and Turkey’s largest protests in more than a decade were underway.
The choreography was hard to miss. İmamoğlu’s university diploma was annulled the day before his detention — a technicality that would have barred his presidential candidacy. His party, the opposition CHP, had scheduled its primary for Sunday; more than 15 million people voted for him anyway, in a primary held while its candidate sat in a cell. Prosecutors accuse him of corruption, bribery, extortion, money laundering and aiding terrorism. He denies everything, and much of the country plainly believes the case is about 2028, not about evidence.
The state’s answer to the crowds was administrative before it was forceful: demonstrations banned in Istanbul, Ankara and İzmir, roads sealed, social media throttled. Then it was forceful too. Protesters outside Istanbul’s city hall were met with pepper spray and rubber bullets; more than a hundred people were detained alongside the mayor, and hundreds more in the days that followed. The lira slid to record lows as investors read the arrest for what it was.
For Europe, this is not a distant affair. Turkey is a member of the Council of Europe and technically still an EU candidate, and the reaction from both institutions was unusually blunt. The Council of Europe, the European Parliament and Human Rights Watch condemned the detention as an attack on the will of the electorate. Strasbourg’s machinery is slow, but Turkey already holds one of the largest inventories of unimplemented judgments at the European Court of Human Rights.
İmamoğlu has been here before, in a way: he won Istanbul in 2019, watched the result annulled, and won again by a landslide in the re-run. Jail is a different instrument than a cancelled election. The question hanging over Turkey now is whether jailing a rival works better than cancelling his victory did. The early evidence — a million people in the streets and 15 million ballots — suggests the government has not thought that through.
