Turkish police have detained more than 1,100 people, including journalists, since the arrest of the mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoglu – President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s main rival – sparked the country’s worst unrest in years, a minister said on Monday.
The demonstrations began in Istanbul after Imamoglu’s arrest 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 Erdogan at the ballot box.
In just four days he went from being the mayor of Istanbul – a post that launched Erdogan’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 CHP’s candidate for the 2028 presidential run, with some 15 million people casting their ballots in a show of support for Imamoglu.
Observers said it was the looming primary that triggered the move against Imamoglu, the main political rival of Erdogan who has dominated Turkey’s politics since 2003, first as prime minister and then as president.
Journalists, lawyers detained
On Monday, students at the main universities in Istanbul and Ankara called for a boycott of lectures.
Young protesters also held a rally at 1400 GMT by Besiktas port on the Bosphorus, ahead of the main nightly rally outside City Hall at 1730 GMT.
Sunday night’s gathering descended into fierce clashes with riot police kicking and beating people in Istanbul, AFP correspondents said.
Before dawn on Monday, police detained 10 Turkish journalists at home, including an AFP photographer, “for covering the protests”, the MLSA rights group said.
Most of them were covering the mass demonstrations outside City Hall, it said, in a move denounced by Imamoglu’s wife.
Dilek Kaya Imamoglu told tens of thousands of demonstrators, who were protesting for the fifth consecutive night since Imamoglu’s arrest, outside City Hall in Istanbul that the government would pay for targeting the popular opposition figure.
“He will defeat you!… you will lose!” she said.
“The injustice Ekrem faced… it struck a chord with every conscience. Everyone found something of themselves and the injustices they faced in what was done to Ekrem,” she added.
Since Wednesday, police had detained more than 1,133 people for “illegal activities”, Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya said on Monday.
Among them were two lawyers who were defending protesters detained by the police, the Bar Association in the western coastal city of Izmir said.
Imamoglu – 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.
Throughout Sunday, millions voted in the CHP’s highly symbolic primary, which was opened to voters beyond the party’s 1.7 million members.
“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 on Sunday.
“We object to multiple court orders from the Turkish Information and Communication Technologies Authority to block over 700 accounts of news organisations, journalists, political figures, students, and others within Turkiye,” the X communications team said in a statement, using the Turkish government’s preferred name for the country.
“Providing a platform committed to defending everyone’s right to free speech is paramount at X, and we believe this decision from the Turkish government is not only unlawful, it hinders millions of Turkish users from news and political discourse in their country.”
Countries react
Imamoglu’s jailing drew sharp condemnation from Germany, which called it “totally unacceptable” as Greece said moves to undermine civil liberties “cannot be tolerated”.
And the EU warned Ankara it needed to demonstrate “a clear commitment to democratic norms”.
France’s foreign ministry said in a statement Sunday night it was a “serious attack on democracy”.
The ministry pointed out that Turkey, which has been led by Erdogan for over 20 years, had promised to protect the rights of opposition figures.
Freedom of expression and the right to peaceful assembly are cornerstones of the rule of law, the statement added, highlighting that Turkey — as a Council of Europe member and candidate to join the European Union — had “freely entered into commitments in this area.”
“The respect of these commitments is a central element of our relations as well as relations between Turkey and the European Union,” the Foreign Ministry said.
