Vast crowds of students surged onto İstanbul’s streets Monday in the latest protest over the arrest and jailing of İstanbul’s opposition mayor, sparking Turkey’s worst unrest in years.
The demonstrations began after Ekrem İmamoğlu’s March 19 detention and have since spread to more than 55 of Turkey’s 81 provinces, sparking clashes with riot police and drawing international condemnation.
Police have arrested more than 1,130 people over the past six days, including 43 on Monday night, the interior minister said. Among them are journalists, including an Agence France-Presse photographer.
İmamoğlu, 53, of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), is widely seen as the only politician capable of defeating Turkey’s longtime leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan at the ballot box.
In just four days he went from being the mayor of İstanbul — a post that launched Erdoğan’s political rise decades earlier — to being detained, interrogated, jailed and stripped of the mayorship as a result of a graft and terror probe.
On Monday, students in both İstanbul and Ankara began gathering in the early afternoon after announcing they were boycotting lectures at the main universities in both cities.
In İstanbul, as crowds of chanting, flag-waving students headed through the streets to Beşiktaş, a port on the Bosphorus, residents applauded and banged saucepans in a show of support, AFP correspondents said.
‘Your palaces, our streets’
After rallying by the port, the students began marching along the coast towards the historic peninsula to join the nightly protest outside City Hall, an AFP correspondent said.
“This is not a meeting, this is an act of defiance against fascism!” CHP leader Özgür Özel told the vast crowd, which held up a sea of banners including one aimed at Erdoğan that read “Palaces are yours, the streets are ours.”
After meeting his cabinet on Monday, Erdoğan once again accused the opposition of provoking the protests.
“Stop playing with the nation’s nerves,” he said, while also insisting that everything was under control with the Turkish economy, saying the government had “successfully managed the last market fluctuation.”
The move against İmamoğlu has badly hurt the lira and caused chaos on Turkey’s financial markets.
The benchmark BIST 100 stock index closed nearly 8.0 percent lower on Friday but recovered somewhat on Monday, ending the session around 3.0 percent higher.
On Sunday, İmamoğlu was overwhelmingly chosen as the CHP’s candidate for a 2028 presidential run, with observers saying it was the looming primary that triggered the move against him.
His jailing drew sharp condemnation from Germany, which called it “totally unacceptable”, while neighboring Greece said moves to undermine civil liberties “cannot be tolerated.”
And the European Union warned Ankara it needed to demonstrate “a clear commitment to democratic norms.” Overnight, France’s foreign ministry said İmamoğlu’s arrest was a “serious attack on democracy.”
‘Stop targeting journalists’
Before dawn on Monday, police detained 10 Turkish journalists at their homes, including an AFP photographer, “for covering the protests,” the MLSA rights group said.
The move was condemned by the Journalists’ Union of Turkey, the Turkish Journalists Association and several other associations.
“Stop targeting journalists!” they said in a joint statement, saying many journalists had been subjected to police violence, tear gas and plastic bullets while reporting.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) demanded “the release of the journalists arrested”, said the group’s Turkey representative, Erol Önderoğlu.
The detentions were also denounced by İmamoğlu’s wife.
“What is being done to members of the press and journalists is a matter of freedom. None of us can remain silent about this,” Dilek Kaya İmamoğlu posted on X.
İmamoğlu, who has denounced the judicial moves against him as a political “execution without trial,” sent a defiant message from jail via his lawyers.
“I wear a white shirt that you cannot stain. I have a strong arm that you cannot twist. I won’t budge an inch. I will win this war,” he said.
© Agence France-Presse