Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan pulls straight and Turkey tries to resist how it succeeds. The judiciary confirmed the arrest of the now former mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoglu, after four days of interrogations to him and to almost 100 people stopped last Wednesday. The Ministry of the Interior has dismissed him from his office and now the eyes are focused on who will replace it.
The former first citizen will therefore go to trial and will have to defend himself from two charges: corruption and aiding and abetting terrorist organization. The Prefecture prohibited events until next Wednesday. A decision that, however, is not disenchanted thousands of people from going into the square in the megalopolis on the Bosphorus as in the rest of the country. Everyone’s finger is aimed at the president, father-master of modern Türkiye, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, for which Imamoglu represented the most serious obstacle to yet another re-election. There would also be the Constitution, which does not provide for him the possibility of recovering himself, but on this point, in all probability, the Kurdish party will meet him, who in Parliament could support the amendments proposed by the majority in exchange for the constitutional awards that has been waiting for for years. It would be a sensational move, the result of the agreement between the Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Abdullah Öcalan, the founder of the Kurdistan workers’ party, in prison on the island of Imrali since 1999 and which would thus be able to barter his release or a milder prison regime. “Imamoglu’s arrest – explains journalist Yavuz Baydar, who escaped from Türkiye following the 2016 ‘failed coup’ – is something that has no precedent. Not even for Erdogan. It was an opponent’s offense in advance. Thus Turkey sinks from autoritarianism to the dictatorship ».
A Türkiye that resembles Russia more and more, but where the people are determined to make their voices heard. The CHP, the Republican Party of the people, where I play Imamoglu, continue to appeal because people take to the square and on Sunday 23 March it still held the primaries, the same ones who should have crowned Ekrem Imamoglu, the only candidate, as an Erdogan challenger to the presidential elections of 2028 Even hours were expected to give their preference to the first citizen – although they will hardly be able to do it in the electoral site. That of the former mayor seems to be an already written sentence, above all because Murat Ongun, one of his closest collaborators, admitted that he had witnessed the payment of some bribes at the time of the CHA Congress, because Özgür Özel, sponsor of the former mayor, was elected as secretary.
Meanwhile, the arrest of Imamoglu has been having for days series repercussions also on the markets, with the bag that closes in the negative and the investors who run away from the Turkish bonds. Perhaps, this time, Erdogan could really have dared too much.
