İmamoğlu’s Arrest

Ekrem İmamoğlu, the mayor of Istanbul, was arrested early in the morning of Wednesday, 19 March, on two charges – one related to corruption and the other to terrorism. He released a video of himself shortly before the arrest, talking to the camera while nonchalantly adjusting his tie. ‘Hundreds of police officers have arrived at my door,’ he said. ‘I entrust myself to the people.’ The previous day, his diploma in business administration from Istanbul University was nullified, supposedly because of irregularities in his transfer from a private university in Northern Cyprus in 1990. More to the point, someone without a university degree cannot run for president.

İmamoğlu, of the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), defeated President Erdoğan’s AKP candidate in the mayoral elections in 2019 and was re-elected last year. He has long been expected to run against Erdoğan in the presidential election scheduled for 2028. Özgür Özel, the CHP leader, called on people to take to the streets in protest at İmamoğlu’s arrest. They did, in vast numbers: singing ‘Bella Ciao’ on buses and trams, waving union banners, carrying signs: ‘If you’re reading this, you’re in the resistance.’

The CHP nominated İmamoğlu for the presidency anyway. On Sunday, long lines of voters waited to have their say in the CHP primary. By the end of the evening, more than fifteen million people – 1.6 million party members, and 13.8 million others – across the country had voted for İmamoğlu. Özel challenged Erdoğan to call an early election.

This time last year, in the lead up to the local elections, the CHP in Istanbul formed a loose alliance, known as the ‘city consensus’, with the Peoples’ Democratic Congress (HDK), an umbrella group of left-wing organisations who stand in solidarity with the Kurdish people. This was not the first time that the CHP, the successor of the Kemalist project, had entered into political coalition with a pro-Kurdish democracy movement, but it was the first to offer Kurds the concrete gain of representation in western municipalities. The CHP won several additional metropolitan mayoralties across the country.

Last month, during the first snowstorm Istanbul has seen in years, sixty people affiliated with the HDK were arrested. They were accused of being a front for the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK), which is proscribed as a terrorist organisation. Among their number were Yıldız Tar, the editor-in-chief of KaosGL.org, one of the oldest and largest LGBT rights organisations in Turkey, and many other prominent journalists and academics. They are still languishing in pre-trial detention. Their arrest provided the pretext to detain İmamoğlu – along with dozens of others – on terror charges for his association with them through the city consensus. (It’s worth noting that the leader of the PKK, Abdullah Öcalan, called for the group to lay down arms at the end of February.)

Under a series of İmamoğlu’s AKP predecessors as mayor, Istanbul enjoyed an apparently endless supply of foreign money and underwent a frenzy of transformation, with the construction of a third bridge over the Bosphorus, a vast new airport, and new mosques, skyscrapers, shopping malls and road tunnels remapping the city in a concrete expression of the AKP’s power.

Under İmamoğlu’s mayorship, which has coincided with a devastating economic crisis, the city has expanded public transport infrastructure, and offers free transport for mothers as well as subsidised nursery care in poorer neighbourhoods. A heritage project is working to restore historic Ottoman structures across the city. Images of İmamoğlu wearing a hard-hat smile down from billboards at building sites and transport hubs. His critics argue that he too, like the AKP, is beholden to the monsters of tourism and commodification.

The terror charges laid against İmamoğlu could open the way for a state-appointed official to take over the governance of the city as a kayyum (‘trustee’), as has happened for years in municipalities where Kurdish parties have won elections. Two CHP municipalities in Istanbul – Esenyurt and Şişli – have already been taken over by a kayyum in the last few days, after their mayors were found guilty of terror-related offences.

The arrest of İmamoğlu and his associates is part of a broader attack against the wider opposition. It is being met with an equally broad show of defiance by those who recognise this as a historical moment and are suffering from the economic crisis. These are the largest protests since the Gezi Park occupation in May 2013, with several hundred thousands gathering in the streets every night

The police response to the protests at İmamoğlu’s arrest was at first relatively restrained in Istanbul – before they started arresting people. Hundreds have now been detained. A ten-day broadcast ban has been imposed on the opposition TV channel Sözcü. Policing has been more heavy-handed on university campuses, especially at ODTÜ in Ankara. In all the demonstrations, a younger generation – who have lived their whole lives under one-man rule – have been leading figures. Students at many universities have launched an academic boycott, refusing – along with some of their professors – to attend classes, and instead holding mass demonstrations. At Saraçhane in Istanbul, close to the arches of the Roman aqueduct, the youthful crowd made its presence felt. They booed a leftist singer from the 1970s off stage in a show of impatience with a certain form of nostalgia.

But many also held banners of Mustafa Kemal. The spectre of his patriarchal figure, reimagined and reconfigured, still provides inspiration – including to those who are not organised in any traditional political party (‘we’re here for a demonstration, not for a rally,’ they chanted on Saturday night). Some of them want to see Atatürk’s ghost in İmamoğlu today. Nostalgia for Kemalism is reinforced by rhetoric from the CHP, who are casting this moment in the same language of conquest as helped bring the AKP to power. (They are also calling on people to boycott twenty companies, including media groups and coffee chains.)

In his speeches to the crowds gathered in Istanbul, Özel has repeated Erdoğan’s refrain that ‘whoever takes Istanbul, eventually takes Turkey.’ Erdoğan was elected mayor of Istanbul in 1994 and jailed in 1998 on the charge of inciting religious hatred. Four years later he led the AKP to a landslide general election victory. He may see his own ghost in the figure of İmamoğlu.