Erdogan eliminates his main adversary

He is convinced that he alone is capable of fulfilling the mission of entrenching Islam in Turkey forever, with all that this entails, thus definitively erasing what he himself considers to be an error: the secularism imposed by Kemal Atatürk. 

His main adversary has been taken out of the picture. Ekrem Imamoglu, the mayor of Istanbul, after being arrested on the 19th with a huge police deployment, was taken into custody this Sunday, once the maximum legal period of four days of police custody had elapsed. 

The public prosecutor's office, which depends on and follows the line drawn by Erdogan, is accusing Imagoglu of corruption and terrorism. The former refers to various tenders for municipal works. The latter links him to the pro-Kurdish left-wing party DEM, the successor to the HDP. The prosecutor's office understands that, although DEM is now a legal party, it has a terrorist past and that some of its members were on the lists of the social democrats of the CHP, the social democratic party of Imagoglu, in the municipal elections of 2024. Elections in which the mayor of Istanbul overwhelmingly retained his mandate with a million-vote lead over the AKP candidate, well above the 800,000-vote margin that gave him victory in 2019. 

In addition to the arrest of more than a hundred officials and advisers to the mayor of Istanbul, the police have also arrested hundreds of demonstrators who have not given up their protests, both against the imprisonments and against the progressive curtailment of freedoms and democratic guarantees in the country. President Erdogan has expressly backed this new wave of repression in various Turkish cities, warning that he will not be intimidated by street riots or revolts. 

Among the demonstrators, who have arrived in their hundreds of thousands in Istanbul, there is a general feeling that President Erdogan has taken the only candidate with a good chance of succeeding him out of the electoral race. And he has done so precisely when this Sunday the CHP was due to hold primary elections to appoint the official candidate for the Presidency of the Republic. 

Theoretically, such elections should be held in 2028, but there were many indications that they could be brought forward. The reason is that, constitutionally, Erdogan could not stand again because he had exhausted his terms of office. The only exception in which he could do so would be if Parliament decided that the elections should be brought forward due to emergency causes. 

For this Sunday's primaries, Imamoglu was the virtual candidate, as his main rival, the mayor of Ankara, Mansur Yavas, had decided to withdraw from the competition and obey the instructions of the CHP leader, Özgür Özel, to support the mayor of Istanbul. In addition to the internal reasons of the social democratic party, practically all the polls carried out outside the ruling party give a comfortable victory to Imamoglu if he were to face Erdogan in those hypothetical early elections. 

Now, imprisoned on remand, his supporters think and spread the idea that Imamoglu could suffer an ordeal similar to that of the murdered opponent of Russian President Vladimir Putin, in reference to suffering a process that is prolonged over time, with repeated convictions and new sentences, and even that he be subjected to humiliating treatment and punishments that involve progressive isolation. 

As for the president's Islamist party, the AKP, its spokespeople strive to highlight Erdogan's ‘significant mediating role’ in the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, which have once again put Turkey at the forefront of the international scene, ‘achievements which, in addition to containing inflation and stabilising the economy, we will not allow to be put at risk’. An argument that would clearly justify, according to his supporters, the current president's perpetuation in power, and the consequent outlawing of any opponent with the potential to defeat him at the ballot box.