The News
Protests erupted in Istanbul Wednesday after Turkish police arrested the city’s mayor, the main political rival to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
Ekrem İmamoğlu was detained Wednesday on terrorism and corruption allegations, according to state media, days before his party was due to select him to run against Erdoğan in the country’s next general election.
Thousands of people defied a four-day ban on protests in Istanbul, Turkey’s biggest city, in support of İmamoğlu. Authorities have arrested 37 people for ‘provocative’ social-media posts, The Associated Press reported.
On Thursday İmamoğlu urged his supporters to take a stand against the government’s move to use the courts to detain him.
“I also call on tens of thousands of honourable, moral prosecutors and judges ... You should stand up and take action against those colleagues who are ruining the judiciary... you cannot and must not remain silent,” he wrote via his lawyers in a message on X.
Authorities had already sought to bar İmamoğlu from the race by making him ineligible, but his party said the primary would go ahead this weekend as planned.
SIGNALS
Erdoğan’s popularity is waning, but he could endure
The Turkish economy is in such dire straits that “Erdoğan is bound to lose” the next presidential election even if it were “rigged,” a Turkish political scientist wrote. Indeed, the president’s party suffered its worst defeat in local elections last year. The Turkish leader’s waning popularity has left him two options: “Cancel the elections or remove the contenders. He chose the second.” Critics have long accused Erdoğan of “using state institutions [...] to undermine his political rivals,” The New York Times noted. Turkey’s presidents have a two-term limit, and while the opposition had hoped to force a vote sooner than the 2028 deadline, that “could give [Erdoğan] an opportunity to run again, on the grounds that he did not complete his second term.”
İmamoğlu’s arrest shakes up Turkish markets
The lira initially fell 10% against the US dollar and government bond yields rose to their highest levels this year, as investors — most of whom are Turkish — dumped assets following the mayor’s arrest Wednesday. İmamoğlu’s arrest will come as “a shock to global investors who had largely turned positive on Turkey” after President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan reversed years of unorthodox monetary policies last year, Bloomberg wrote. Turkish stocks had entered a bull market earlier this month amid promising inflation figures, interest rate cuts, and a push for stronger ties with the European Union. Some analysts now expect Turkey’s central bank to hold back from cutting rates further to try and stem the bleeding. The crackdown has been “a wake-up call for everybody,” one analyst told the Financial Times.