Faced with Recep Tayyip Erdogan has a delicate paradox. How to stay in power, even if the constitution prohibits him from presenting himself to the next presidential election of 2028? “The Turkish President has failed to organize his succession, and still sees himself alone in control,” observes Dorothée Schmid, head of the Türkiye program at Ifri.
Only, on March 19, the situation changed. The arrest and the imprisonment of Ekrem Imamoglu, mayor of Istanbul and principal opponent of Erdogan, woke up the Turkish street. Since March 19, thousands of them have gathered every day to oppose this forcibly. “If we accept what is going on, democracy dies,” said his wife a few days ago, Dilek Imamoglu, in front of an angry crowd.
Arrests of opponents, instrumentalization of justice, purges in the army or the public service, without forgetting the constitutional reforms to assume full powers … The repressive range at the disposal of Recep Tayyip Erdogan makes a bad wind blow on Turkey. That of autocratic tilting. This is the object of our new long video format.