Can you tell us about the arrest of the mayor of Istanbul?

On the morning of March 19, Ekrem Imamoğlu, the mayor of Istanbul, was taken into custody along with around a hundred other mayoral staff on charges of “corruption” and “connection with terrorism”. The day before, his university degree (obtained 30 years ago) was arbitrarily annulled, with the obvious aim of preventing his candidacy in the next presidential election. Ekrem Imamoğlu, having twice won Istanbul’s municipal elections - in 2019 and 2024 - as a candidate for the CHP (Republican People’s Party, secular center-left), has established himself over time as Erdogan’s main opponent.

On March 23, the CHP was due to hold its “pre-elections” to decide on its candidate for the next ballot, normally scheduled for 2028 but most likely to take place earlier, to allow Erdogan to run one last time. Unless there is a constitutional change, which is also under discussion. The aim of this operation is therefore very clear: to render the main opposition candidate ineligible, criminalize his management of Istanbul’s mayoralty and perhaps even appoint an administrator in place of the elected mayor, as has been happening for several years in the municipalities of Kurdistan, in south-west Turkey.

Can you describe the mobilization in the face of this?

Today is the third day of mobilizations. Every day, the CHP calls for rallies in front of Istanbul City Hall. Tens of thousands of people are taking part. Of course, in addition to CHP members and supporters, all sectors of the opposition are mobilizing, including the radical left, against what has come to be known as the “March 19 coup”.

It’s worth remembering that the country has been living in an atmosphere of permanent repression since the Gezi revolt in 2013. The end of negotiations with the Kurdish movement, the remilitarization of the Kurdish question and the resumption of the war, the attempted coup d’état carried out by Erdogan’s former allies and the state of emergency decreed in its wake, the ban on strikes and the repression of the feminist and LGBTI+ movements are the main milestones in the development of authoritarianism articulated to the construction of an autocratic regime led by Erdogan. We are therefore in a country where mobilizations are rare, where the reflex to protest in the street has become quite unusual and risky for ordinary citizens. But despite this and the ban on rallies in Istanbul, there are major mobilizations and, above all, a spirit of protest that can be felt on the streets, in the workplace, on public transport, and so on.

On the second evening, in many parts of Istanbul and dozens of other cities, citizens came out to protest, with the main slogans “Government resign!”, “Down with the AKP dictatorship!”, “No individual liberation! All together or none of us”.

What is the scale of the mobilization among young people?

Precisely the most important and surprising element is the mobilization of university students. Universities have been depoliticized for years, radical left-wing movements are weak and their capacity for action is drastically reduced. So the current generation of students, while probably having grown up with stories of the Gezi revolt told by their parents, has almost no experience of organizing and mobilizing. This is true even of young revolutionary activists, who have not even had the opportunity to “do their job” in universities.

But despite this, through an “electric jolt” as Rosa Luxembourg1 used to say, a spontaneous radicalism is awakening in the universities. There are, of course, many social-economic (objective) and cultural-ideological (subjective) factors that come together to forge this mobilization. We’ll have to think about that later. But the fact that in a country that is becoming poorer, where it is difficult to find work, that offers no “promise of happiness” to young people, where years of study mean almost nothing on the job market, the fact that a diploma can be cancelled with a simple government pressure on the university is also an element that has probably contributed to achieving this jolt, in a sector of youth that was more or less predisposed to it.

What impact is this student radicalization having on the protests?

I think it’s shaking things up, and forcing the CHP to break out of its pre-constructed opposition patterns. As I said, CHP president Özgür Özel has called for a rally outside Istanbul town hall. But it has to be said that no serious preparations had been made to accommodate tens of thousands of people. The main objective was to call on citizens to vote in the pre-elections on March 23 and thus demonstrate Imamoğlu’s legitimacy against the regime, but also to continue the “fight” at the judicial level, by appealing, etc

Faced with this, the slogans most chanted by young people (who made up the majority of rallies in front of the mayor’s office) were “liberation is in the streets, not in the ballot box” or “resistance is in the streets, not in the ballot box”. Faced with this pressure from young people, who succeeded on several occasions in breaking down police barriers in front of universities, who marched en masse in Ankara to ODTÜ University and clashed with the CRS, who forced the police to send riot intervention vehicles to the universities (notably in Izmir), who refused to disperse at the end of official CHP rallies and wanted to march to Taksim (the historic symbolic site of resistance since the May 1^st 1977 massacre to the Gezi uprising), the CHP leadership had to give in. Özgür Özel called on the people to “storm the squares”. “If obstacles are erected in front of us on the basis of an order contrary to the law, overthrow them, without hurting the police,” he added. Which is quite exceptional. Özel also agreed to install a second stand at Saraçhane, for the students.

How can we link this situation with what’s happening in Kurdistan, with the peace “process”?

It’s a very contradictory process, but one we’ve already experienced. Let’s not forget that during the Gezi uprising in 2013, when the west of the country was going up in flames, there were negotiations with Abdullah Öcalan, leader of the PKK. And of course, while the radical opposition to the regime usually came from the Kurdish regions, or from the Kurdish movement, this time their participation is naturally more limited. However, we saw that these two dynamics of contestation had converged in the candidacy of Selahattin Demirtaş, of the left-wing pro-Kurdish HDP party in the 2015 elections.

Today, while once again there is a process of “peace” according to the Kurds, of “disarmament” according to the regime (a facet of which can also be seen in the agreements initiated between Rojava and the new Syrian regime), the Turkish state is conducting a campaign of violent repression against the secular bourgeois opposition, journalists... but also against elements of the Kurdish movement. For the Kurds, the regime wants to show (above all to its own social and electoral base) that it still has its iron fist within its grasp, and that there is no question of negotiation but of “putting an end to terrorism”. As for the imprisonment of Imamoglu and other CHP mayors, if one of the charges is corruption, the other is links with or support for terrorism, since the CHP had forged an informal alliance with the Kurdish movement party in the 2024 municipal elections under the name of “urban consensus”.

Another surprising fact is that all demonstrations and gatherings in Istanbul have been banned except for Newroz, a festival celebrating the arrival of spring in the Middle East and the Caucasus, but which has acquired political-national significance for the Kurdish movement over several decades. So it could be said that Erdogan’s regime is trying to take another, decisive step in the construction of its regime, to reinforce its neo-fascist character by subduing the two biggest “chunks”, the secular bourgeois opposition represented by the CHP/Imamoglu and the Kurdish movement.

In the case of the former, by criminalizing it, imprisoning its representatives, perhaps forcing it to change its leadership and candidate, and finally destroying all legitimacy of the elections. As for the Kurdish movement, the regime will probably try to “de-radicalize” it, making it an ally at national and regional level (Syria, Iraq) in the hope that, in exchange for a few gains (of which no details are known at present), the movement will abandon its fight for the democratization of the entire country and guarantee a more peaceful existence with the regime. For the time being, the Dem Party (formerly HDP) has announced that it strongly opposes this “civil putsch” against Imamoglu and the other elected representatives, and that it is calling on the opposition forces to protest together at the Newroz rally on March 23.

Of course, we can’t anticipate the outcome of Erdogan’s two-pronged strategy, but as the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci once said, only the struggle can be foreseen

March 21 2025

Antoine Larrache, Uraz Aydin