Turkey's opposition unites against government crackdown; Ekrem Imamoglu's arrest sparks wave of protests

Protesters were to join a mass rally in Istanbul Saturday at the call of Turkey’s main opposition CHP over the jailing of the city’s mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, a top figure in the party whose arrest has sparked 10 days of the country’s biggest street demonstrations in a decade.

Imamoglu’s detention on March 19 has also prompted a repressive government response that has been sharply condemned by rights groups and drawn criticism from abroad.

The rally, which begins at 0900 GMT in Maltepe on the Asian side of Istanbul, is the first such CHP-led gathering since Tuesday and comes on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration marking the end of Ramadan, which starts Sunday.

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Widely seen as the only Turkish politician capable of challenging President Recep Tayyip Erdogan at the ballot box, Imamoglu was elected as the CHP’s candidate for the 2028 presidential race on the day he was jailed.

“Imamoglu’s candidacy for president is the beginning of a journey that will guarantee justice and the nation’s sovereignty. Let’s go to Maltepe.. and start our march to power together!” CHP leader Ozgur Ozel said on X.

The protests over his arrest quickly spread across Turkey, with vast crowds joining mass nightly rallies outside Istanbul City Hall called by the CHP, that often degenerated into running battles with riot police.

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Although the last such rally was Tuesday, student groups have kept up their own protests, most of them masked despite a police crackdown that has seen nearly 2,000 people arrested.

Among them were 20 minors who were arrested between March 22-25, of whom seven remained in custody, the Istanbul Bar Association said Friday.

In Istanbul, at least 511 students were detained, many in predawn raids, of whom 275 were jailed, lawyer Ferhat Guzel told AFP, while admitting that the number was “probably much higher”.

The authorities have also cracked down on media coverage, arresting 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deporting a BBC correspondent and arresting a Swedish reporter who flew into Istanbul to cover the unrest.

Although 11 journalists were freed Thursday, among them AFP photographer Yasin Akgul, two more were detained on Friday as was Imamoglu’s lawyer Mehmet Pehlivan, who was later granted conditional release.

Swedish journalist Joakim Medin, who flew into Turkey on Thursday to cover the demonstrations, was jailed on Friday, his employer Dagens ETC told AFP, saying it was not immediately clear what the charges were.

‘Accusations 100 percent false’

Unconfirmed reports in the Turkish media said Medin was being held for “insulting the president” and belonging to a “terror organisation”.

“I know that these accusations are false, 100 percent false,” Dagens ETC’s editor-in-chief Andreas Gustavsson wrote on X account.

In a post on social media, Swedish Foreign Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard said Stockholm was taking his arrest “seriously”.

Turkish authorities held BBC journalist Mark Lowen for 17 hours on Wednesday before deporting him on the grounds he posed “a threat to public order”, the broadcaster said.

Turkey’s communications directorate put his deportation down to “a lack of accreditation”.

Baris Altintas, co-director of MLSA, the legal NGO helping many of the detainees, told AFP the authorities “seem to be very determined on limiting coverage of the protests.

“As such, we fear that the crackdown on the press will not only continue but also increase.”