Turkey Resists

By arresting İmamoğlu, Erdoğan banks on public apathy. He's getting the opposite.

Istanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu is by far the most viable opposition politician in Turkey. The Islamist elite that is running the country rightly sees him as a threat and has long sought to prevent him from running. They have now arrested him on criminal charges.

Most serious people don’t think that the charges are worth discussing, but I think it’s important to look at the narrative surrounding them.

So let’s turn on the regime’s own TV stations. What do we see?

We see well-heeled and well-rested talking heads, speaking to us very calmly and deliberately about a tragic set of events happening in our country. They say that they’d like the Turkish opposition to be a strong counterweight to the government, but alas, that is not the case. The main opposition CHP, they say, is a cesspool of corruption. Its most powerful figure, Istanbul mayor İmamoğlu, is a nihilistic opportunist who knows he can’t win against President Erdoğan, but plays the opposition game to get rich. He inspires hope in millions of his voters, thinking that their support will grant him legal immunity as he plunders the city’s coffers. The Erdoğan government, meanwhile, is desperately trying to wake people up to the scam. The president wishes — against his own political interest — that Turkey had a competent main opposition party, one that could compete with his party and push them to come up with better policies. Still, we are told, he is patient, and hopes that the CHP will reform itself in time.

However, the CHP’s corruption reaches such extreme levels that Erdoğan (and the august statesmen surrounding him) decide that they can no longer watch the charade. They arrest İmamoğlu, take over Istanbul municipality, and possibly the entire CHP, in order to redesign it all from the ground up. Yes, it looks very “undemocratic” and all, but the opposition is deeply corrupt (probably due to their mindset of subservience to Western forms) and this is the least bad option.

From top to bottom: “The background to the great corruption at Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality,” “İmamoğlu’s terror connections have been deciphered,” “ahaber.com.tr has reached details to the traffic in dirty money”. Source: Ahaber

Turkey simply cannot afford all this dead weight, the commentators say. Under Erdoğan, the country has become a world power, and cannot afford its greatest cities to be run by charlatans. Turkey deserves better. And besides, once restructured, the new main opposition party will be released into the wild, and perform as a patriotic counter-force to the AK Party.

How’s that? Are you convinced?

Maybe you nodded along on some parts. There is something seductive about it, isn’t there? The CHP really is a mess! İmamoğlu is a bit full of himself. And Erdoğan really did make Turkey into a more powerful country. If you want to ride along the Erdoğan train, there’s definitely something you can latch on to here.

Still, would you believe that narrative in moments nobody is watching? Probably not. You’d have to be a complete idiot to believe it.

And people aren’t idiots.

The millions of people voting for Erdoğan who hear this story every day don’t believe it. The people going on TV and regurgitating it over and over again don’t believe it. The people in the presidential palace who come up with it don’t believe it either.

They might “believe” it, with a wink and a smile. If pushed, they’ll tell you not to be naive. At the end of the day, what matters is power, it’s what you can get away with. And clearly, the regime can get away with this. They are indeed, immensely powerful.

Their actual message to the opposition is crystal clear: you can conduct opposition politics in the country, but you can’t do it well. You can blow off steam, but you can’t actually pose an electoral threat to Erdoğan. If you do, we will see you coming, we will arrest you and throw away the key. We are watching your every move.

It’s remarkable that they threw everything at İmamoğlu at once: they cancelled his university diploma (tertiary education is a requirement for presidential candidates) as well as charges of corruption, terrorism, and treason. It might at first seem counterproductive for them to do this. Why not just cancel the guy’s diploma and legally bar him from running? Because then İmamoğlu looks like a perfectly fine politician who was unfairly disqualified. They had to make him into a villain to give their claims force. They needed “muzzle velocity,” to use Steven Bannon’s expression.

The strategic rationale is evident at once. The presidential elections are scheduled for 2028, so the regime wanted toget rid of İmamoğlu before then, knock down the CHP while you’re at it, then take a couple of years for things to calm down. To borrow a term from economics, this is countercyclical repression. Ahmet Hakan, the editor of the regime-held newspaper Hürriyet wrote:

We live in a country where the most hotly debated agenda is forgotten three days later.

In such a country, the Ekrem İmamoğlu storm...

- Can rage for a week.

- Can rage for a month.

- At most, it can rage on for a year.

*

And then what?

Then, slowly, it starts to settle. Then boredom sets in.

Then it is thrown into the garden of forgetting.

*

The election is exactly three years away.

There is no way the storm can rage for three years.

This is intended as balm to the Islamist soul. He’s saying “don’t fear the backlash, these people are so stupid that they’ll forget about it and squabble among themselves.” The contempt in the statement, not just for the public, but also for the very notion of truth, is unmistakeable.

Ahmet Hakan, and the age old question.

For the regime’s elites who look for investigations to vindicate them will look in vain. I don’t think there’s going to be anything that hints at actual criminal conduct. Opposition municipalities are under a lot of pressure from the regime. They’ve been threatened for a long time, and there’s constant inspections into their affairs. The “revelations” so far have been restricted to relatively modest amounts of personal saving.

Meanwhile, the AK Party is universally recognized as being amazingly corrupt, and not in the petty “let me pocket some public money” kind of way, but in the “let’s create gigantic financial instruments that divert rivers of money into my own private fiefdom” kind of way. None of it could ever be investigated because of how intrinsic it is to their existence. Erdoğan hasn’t even done a performative anti-corruption drive among his oligarchs, the way Xi Jinping and Putin have done. Everyone knows that his cohort has become amazingly wealthy, while the average person has become poorer and lives under more precarious conditions.

Still, in the early hours after İmamoğlu’s arrest, most of us were distraught. I guess the defeats have been piling up. The CHP’s reaction on the first day was timid. They did exactly what the regime probably hoped they would do, which is to express outrage, but warn people against coming out on the streets.

It was footage of a group at Istanbul University breaking through police barricades that breathed a bit of courage into the public. They’re too young for the cynicism those in power have infused in us. Their reaction was instinctively self-affirming and hopeful, and the nation followed. That night, it seemed that the protests weren’t against the regime, but against the CHP, for failing to lead in a moment of crisis.

CHP leader Özgür Özel has since upped the ante, calling on people to come out on to the streets, protest across the country, and most recently, threatened companies with boycotts if they side with the regime at this critical time. Erdoğan has called upon him to “listen to those around him of intelligence and conscience,” instead of the populace, trying to get back to the old CHP. He has long tried to seize control of the party, but he has probably achieved the opposite. The CHP now represents the majority, and that can have a transformative effect. As the saying goes, “the head that is crowned grows wise.” [taç giyen baş akıllanır.]

All this is probably beyond the worst-case scenario the planners at the presidential palace gamed out. There’s no obvious way out for them. If they release İmamoğlu, he’ll be more powerful than ever before, possibly forcing an early election. In the likelier case that they keep him hostage, the people will know that the electoral process — the last remaining check on state power — has been taken away from them indefinitely.

Will we succumb to the cynical plots of the party-state, or will we have the courage of our convictions and resist?

I leave you with footage of the moment the students at Istanbul University broke through the police barricades. I hope they’ll be an inspiration to others, especially those in Europe and the United States, who face far-right nihilists of their own.