Over a quarter-century ago, a popular Istanbul mayor was stripped of his position and jailed on charges that his supporters decried as politically motivated, later reemerging to become the longest-serving leader in his country’s modern-day history.
That was Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s current president.
But Erdogan is now facing a political crisis that could be the most serious in his increasingly authoritarian reign of more than two decades.
And in a fitting bit of symmetry, it is the arrest of another popular and outspoken Istanbul mayor that sparked it.
For more than a week, protests have raged in Istanbul, Ankara, and other cities and provinces across the country following the March 19 detention of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu on charges that include corruption and aiding a terrorist group.
The unrest is the biggest and broadest to grip the country since the Gezi Park protests that dominated world headlines for weeks in 2013, accelerating what rights groups say has been a slide into authoritarianism under Erdogan.
While no deaths have been reported in the current demonstrations, there have been nearly 1,500 arrests -– including some for insults to Erdogan and his family -– with some journalists jailed and a BBC reporter deported after being informed he was a “threat to public order,” the British broadcaster said.
But the main reason analysts say that the current crisis could prove an even bigger watershed moment for Erdogan and Turkey’s democracy is the changed economic and political environment.
“Back then Erdogan did not really have a charismatic rival, the economy was in a better shape, and most importantly, conservative voters remained loyal to the AK Party [Justice and Development Party],” said Dimitar Bechev, author of the 2022 book Turkey Under Erdogan: How A Country Turned From Democracy And The WesT.
“Now survey after survey identifies the cost of living as the top issue for Turkish citizens. Imamoglu speaks to that latter concern and therefore connects to a wider electorate,” Bechev told RFE/RL.
Strength In Numbers
The scale of the challenge that the charismatic Imamoglu represents for Erdogan and the AK Party is difficult to exaggerate.
His detention came just days before a March 23 primary to confirm him as the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) candidate for a presidential election scheduled for 2028.
Some 15 million citizens turned out for the primary vote –- more than the number who voted for CHP in the 2023 parliamentary elections –- to express support for the sole candidate on the ballot.
CHP announced Imamoglu's nomination on March 24.
At the time of his detention, the 53-year-old was already fighting a 2022 conviction and prison sentence for calling electoral officials “fools” after they canceled the results of his 2019 mayoral win, forcing him to win again in a rerun.
The two-and-a-half-year sentence has not gone into effect due to his appeal.
Just before his arrest, Imamoglu was controversially stripped of his university diploma by his alma mater, Istanbul University, depriving him of the proof of higher education that is a prerequisite for presidential candidates in Turkey.
The accumulation of moves against the politician have inspired widespread doubt of the claim by authorities and pro-government media that the latest investigation targeting him and more than a hundred party colleagues is apolitical.
“Luckily for [Imamoglu] these actions are only going to make him more popular,” Ihor Semyvolos, director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies in Kyiv, told RFE/RL.
Never known for de-escalatory rhetoric, Erdogan, 71, has accused CHP of inciting a “movement of violence” by backing the protests, which have mostly been nonviolent, and of “sinking the economy” with a “show” that he predicted would fade.
CHP has decried Imamoglu’s arrest as a “coup” and held what it said would be its final party rally outside Istanbul’s City Hall on the night of March 25 ahead of a huge rally planned for March 29.
But student protests have continued, with a group of students demonstrating outside the Middle East Technical University in Ankara being attacked by police with water cannon, pepper spray, and plastic pellets early on March 27, the Associated Press reported.
Toward An 'Elected Dictatorship'?
Whatever turn events on the street take, CHP, the party most closely associated with modern Turkey’s founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, appears to have momentum.
That is thanks in large part to Imamoglu, who has been able to reach past the urban, secular, and educated segments of society that form the party’s base, with the “everything will be fine” catchphrase that he has adopted in strong contrast to the incumbent’s more divisive rhetoric.
Constitutional constraints dictate that Erdogan should not be able to run beyond his current term, unless parliament calls a snap election or the basic law itself is amended.
But few doubt that one of those things is going to happen, which explains why CHP held its primary so early.
In January, a spokesman for Erdogan’s AK Party confirmed that a fourth presidential term for the Turkish leader-- who previously served as prime minister before becoming president -- was “on our agenda.”
Devlet Bahceli, leader of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) and a key Erdogan backer, has also expressed support for the idea.
In its Freedom in the World 2025 report, Freedom House named Turkey among 10 countries witnessing the sharpest declines in democratic freedoms in the last decade.
Yet votes are still highly competitive, as witnessed by Imamoglu’s mayoral wins in 2019 and 2024.
In 2024, CHP candidates won a larger share of the vote in local elections nationwide than the AK Party, dealing the ruling party that Erdogan co-founded in 2001 one of its biggest blows since coming to power.
In a column for The Conversation, Ahmet T. Kuru, director of the Center for Islamic & Arabic Studies at San Diego State University, said that Turkey’s longtime leader has proved “a master of electioneering in terms of promoting populist policies and manipulating the media and electoral practices to work against opposition parties.”
But with an economy defined by runaway inflation and a genuinely popular rival, Erdogan is now “really worried” that these tactics will not suffice, Kuru wrote.
If the ruling elite risks further repression, “it could shift Turkey’s political system from a flawed democracy to an ‘elected dictatorship’ akin to Vladimir Putin’s Russia,” Kuru argued.
