THE AMERICA ONE NEWS
May 31, 2025  |  
0
 | Remer,MN
Sponsor:  QWIKET 
Sponsor:  QWIKET 
Sponsor:  QWIKET: Elevate your fantasy game! Interactive Sports Knowledge.
Sponsor:  QWIKET: Elevate your fantasy game! Interactive Sports Knowledge and Reasoning Support for Fantasy Sports and Betting Enthusiasts.
back  
topic
NYTimes
New York Times
28 Mar 2025
Ekrem Imamoglu


NextImg:Opinion | I am Erdogan’s Main Challenger in  Turkey. I Was Arrested.

Early in the morning on March 19, dozens of armed police officers showed up at my door with a detention order. The scene resembled the capture of a terrorist, not of the elected mayor of Istanbul, Turkey’s largest city.

The move — four days before my party, the Republican People’s Party, was to hold a primary for the next presidential race — was dramatic but hardly unexpected. It followed months of escalating legal harassment of me, culminating in the abrupt revocation of my university diploma 31 years after I had graduated. Authorities seemed to believe this would disqualify me from the race because the constitution requires the president to have a degree in higher education.

Realizing he cannot defeat me at the ballot box, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has resorted to other means: having his main political opponent arrested on charges of corruption, bribery, leading a criminal network and aiding the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, even though the charges lack credible evidence. I was suspended from my elected office over the financial charges.

For years, Mr. Erdogan’s regime has gnawed away at democratic checks and balances — silencing the media, replacing elected mayors with bureaucrats, sidelining the legislature, controlling the judiciary and manipulating elections. The large-scale arrests of protesters and journalists in recent months have sent a chilling message: No one is safe. Votes can be nullified and freedoms can be stripped away in an instant. Under Mr. Erdogan, the republic has been transformed into a republic of fear.

This is more than the slow erosion of democracy. It is the deliberate dismantling of our republic’s institutional foundations. My detention marked a new phase in Turkey’s slide into authoritarianism and the use of arbitrary power. A country with a long democratic tradition now faces the serious risk of passing the point of no return.

The crackdown extended beyond me. In a sweeping operation built on an indictment that is no more than a compilation of statements by secret witnesses, the police detained nearly 100 people, including senior municipal administrators and business figures. Disinformation and defamation campaigns in pro-government media preceded the detentions.


Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.


Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber? Log in.

Want all of The Times? Subscribe.