A judge ordered, this Sunday, March 23, the imprisonment for the “corruption” of the opposition mayor of Istanbul Ekrem Imamoglu, announced one of his lawyers to AFP. Also prosecuted for “terrorism”, the councilor, the main rival of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, had been brought on Saturday evening with 90 of his co-accused to the Stambouliote court of Caglayan, protected by a very important police device, before being heard there twice in the night.
The Republican People’s Party (CHP, Social Democrat), the main opposition force to which the mayor of Istanbul belongs, denounced “a political coup”. Justice ordered this Sunday morning the incarceration of other co-accused of the mayor, including one of his close advisers, according to Turkish media. Until late, tens of thousands of people gathered in front of the town hall of Istanbul for the fourth evening consecutive to the call of the opposition to support Ekrem Imamoglu, which denounced “immoral and without foundation” accusations against it.
Protesters spent the night inside the town hall, some trying to sleep on chairs arranged in the hall of the vast building while waiting to be fixed on the fate of the mayor, noted an AFP photographer. In an attempt to prevent disorders, the governorate of Istanbul extended the ban on gatherings until Wednesday evening and announced restrictions on the city to people likely to participate in gatherings, without specifying how it would implement them. The accusation of “support for a terrorist organization” against Ekrem Imamoglu, a figure of the CHP, makes its support feared its replacement by an administrator appointed by the State at the head of the largest city in the country.
“Illegal”
Since Wednesday, the wave of protest triggered by its arrest has spread across Turkey, reaching an unprecedented scale since the great protest movement of Gezi, in 2013, who left the Taksim square in Istanbul. Gatherings took place in at least 55 of the 81 Turkish provinces, more than two thirds of the country, according to a statement made on Saturday by AFP.
These demonstrations led to hundreds of arrests in at least nine cities in the country, according to the authorities. “Just as people went down to the streets to support Erdogan during (the attempt) of July 15 coup (2016), we are on the street to support Imamoglu,” Aykut Cenkut Cenk, 30 on Saturday evening. “We are not the enemies of the State but what is happening is illegal,” he added by brandishing a Turkish flag in court in Caglayan, where the mayor was heard.
Paris and Berlin, as well as the mayors of several major European cities, had also condemned the arrest of Ekrem Imamoglu on Wednesday. In response to the protest, President Erdogan, who himself was mayor of Istanbul in the 1990s, has sworn not to give in to the “terror of the street”.
Ekrem Imamoglu, 53, became the black bane of Erdogan by delighting in 2019 the economic capital of the country to the Justice and Development Party (AKP, Islamo-conservative) of the Head of State, who kept hands on Istanbul with his camp for twenty-five years. The opposition councilor, triumphantly re -elected last year, was to attend initially this Sunday to his nomination as a candidate of his party for the next presidential election, scheduled for 2028. The CHP decided to maintain the organization of this primary, which started at 8 am (local time), and called all the Turks, even not registered in the Party, to take part.