Police have detained more than 1,100 people, officials said Monday — including journalists — since the detention and subsequent arrest of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s main rival triggered some of Turkey’s worst unrest in years.
The demonstrations began in İstanbul after Ekrem İmamoğlu’s detention last week and have since spread to more than 55 of Turkey’s 81 provinces, sparking clashes with riot police and drawing international condemnation.
The popular 53-year-old has been widely seen as the only politician who could defeat Turkey’s longtime leader 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 arrested, interrogated, jailed and stripped of the mayorship as a result of a graft and terror probe.
On Sunday, he was overwhelmingly voted in as the main opposition Republican People’s Party’s (CHP) candidate for the 2028 presidential run, with the ballot — that was opened beyond the party’s 1.7 million members — attracting 15 million votes.
A party spokesman on Monday confirmed his election as the party’s candidate.
Observers said it was the looming primary that triggered the move against İmamoğlu, the main political rival of Erdoğan who has dominated Turkey’s politics since 2003, first as prime minister and then as president.
His jailing drew a sharp condemnation from Germany, which called it “totally unacceptable.”
Early on Monday, police detained 10 Turkish journalists at home, including an Agence France-Presse photographer, “for covering the protests,” the İstanbul-based Media and Law Association said in a statement.
It said most of them were covering the mass demonstrations outside City Hall, where tens of thousands rallied late Sunday, a move 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,” wrote Dilek Kaya İmamoğlu on X.
Police have detained more than 1,133 people over “illegal activities” since the protests began Wednesday, Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya said on X on Monday.
He called the protests “illegal” and said the detainees include “individuals affiliated with 12 different terrorist organizations.”
President Erdoğan last Friday described the protests, that began with the detention of İmamoğlu and dozens of others on Wednesday, in support of his most powerful political rival as “street terror.”
The latest protests are referred to as the worst since the Gezi Park protests of 2013, which began in the summer of 2013 as opposition to an urban development plan in central İstanbul and quickly spread to other cities, posing the biggest challenge to then-prime minister and current president Erdoğan’s rule. The protests were violently suppressed by Erdoğan’s government, which later labeled them a “coup attempt” against him.
Critics accuse Erdoğan of attempting to sideline his most powerful political rival through the use of the judicial power.
Lawyers detained
As on previous nights, Sunday’s gathering — the fifth such mass protest — descended into fierce clashes with riot seen kicking and beating people in İstanbul and elsewhere, AFP correspondents said.
There was no immediate word on overnights arrests but the İzmir Bar Association in the western coastal city said police had arrested two local lawyers, including its former head, who were representing protesters.
Early Monday, İstanbul governor Davut Gül accused demonstrators of “damaging mosques and cemeteries,” warning: “Any attempt to disrupt public order will not be tolerated,” he wrote on X.
As he was being shipped off to Silivri prison on the megacity’s western outskirts, İmamoğlu had denounced the judicial moves against him as a political “execution without trial.”
In a later message from prison as tens of thousands rallied for a fifth night, he sounded a defiant tone.
“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 in the message passed through his lawyers.
Throughout Sunday, millions voted in the CHP’s highly symbolic primary — which effectively became a de facto referendum.
“Out of a total of 15 million votes, 13,211,000 are solidarity votes,” City Hall said, referring to the number of ballots cast by those who were not CHP members.
Faced with the massive protests, Turkey’s authorities sought to shut down more than 700 accounts on X, the online platform said Sunday.
“We object to multiple court orders from the Turkish Information and Communication Technologies Authority to block over 700 accounts of news organizations, journalists, political figures, students, and others within Turkiye,” its communications team said in a statement.
© Agence France-Presse