Hundreds of thousands of people protest in Istanbul against the arrest of Erdogan's main rival.

BarcelonaThousands of people demonstrated this Saturday in Istanbul in the largest protest so far against the arrest last week of the city's mayor, Ekrem Imamoglu, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's main political rival. AFP and Reuters report hundreds of thousands of participants and the largest demonstration in Turkey for more than a decade, and Efe reports that some 200,000 people filled the Maltepe esplanade, on the Asian side of the city. Özgür Özel, the leader of the opposition CHP party, of which Imamoglu is a member, puts the number of participants at more than two million.

Imagoglu was arrested on March 19 on charges of "corruption" and "terrorist activity," charges the opposition sees as a simple pretext to eliminate him from the political race. On Monday, he spent his first night in prison after the government suspended him from office. On the same day, Imamoglu had been elected as his party's candidate, the Kemalist CHP, for the 2028 presidential elections, with the support of 15 million voters in open primaries.

The arrest has sparked an unprecedented wave of protests in the last decade that has already left nearly 2,000 people detained. On Thursday, the Interior Ministry reported that more than 260 were imprisoned awaiting trial. Turkish authorities have also cracked down on media coverage, arresting at least 13 Turkish and two international journalists, a BBC correspondent, who was deported, and a Swedish journalist.

Erdogan harshly criticized the protests, calling them a "violent movement" and a "spectacle," while warning of legal consequences and accusing the opposition of "provoking" the public.

Despite police repression, the opposition has maintained daily protests, culminating so far in Saturday's mass demonstration under the slogan "Freedom for Imamoglu." "If justice is silent, the people will speak," read one of the banners among the crowd. Özel told The World The intention is for a demonstration to be held every Saturday in various cities across the country, while in Istanbul they will be held every Wednesday. "I am prepared to spend eight to ten years in prison if necessary, because if we don't stop this coup attempt it will mean the end of the elections," defended the leader of the CHP, Erdogan's main opposition party, which has controlled Turkey for more than two decades.

The pro-Kurdish left-wing party, the DEM, which is the third political force in the Parliament, has supported the demonstration and called on its followers to attend. However, according to several media outlets, the flags and banners that predominated are those of the CHP and Turkish left-wing unions. "Taksim is everywhere, the resistance is everywhere," some protesters shouted, referring to the massive 2013 protests in Istanbul's Taksim Square.

Erdogan's rival

Imamoglu gained political clout in 2019 when he won the Istanbul mayoral election against the candidate of President Erdogan's AKP party. The AKP forced a rerun, claiming that the votes had been counted incorrectly, but Imamoglu won the second time with a resounding 54% of the vote.

Now, the man who was projected as Erdogan's main rival in the 2028 presidential elections has six pending trials and faces up to 20 years in prison. Furthermore, the day before his arrest, Istanbul University, where Imamoglu graduated in business administration in 1994, annulled his diploma. This decision could block his presidential candidacy because a university education is a mandatory requirement for president in Turkey. The opposition sees the measure as yet another step in political persecution, while the university justified itself by arguing that it was acting in response to the Prosecutor's Office's investigation into an alleged crime of "falsifying official documents."