In Turkey, the opposition forced to respond after the conviction of the mayor of Istanbul, potential rival of Erdogan

In Turkey history repeats itself, and it is no coincidence. On Wednesday December 14, a judge sentenced Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, a charismatic opposition figure and potential rival of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to two years and seven months in prison and ineligibility with immediate effect for ” insult “ to senior government officials. A brutal verdict without nuances on the part of the authorities, which with less than six months of crucial elections, has the effect of a political earthquake. Its aftershocks and effects are incalculable both for the power in place and for the opposition parties in search of a single candidate.

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As soon as the verdict was announced, several thousand people gathered almost spontaneously in the cold, on the large forecourt of Istanbul City Hall, to cries of “Her sey çok güzel olacak” (“Everything will be fine”), Ekrem Imamoglu’s campaign slogan during the last municipal elections, which has become the rallying cry of a crushed opposition which, until then, seemed to have lost all hope.

Above all, this rally made it possible to publicly recall, through the impetuous voice of Meral Aksener, the muse of the nationalist right who speaks for herself “to be the only one capable of scaring Erdogan”that the Head of State had also been sentenced “unfairly”, in 1998, to a prison sentence for remarks he had made as mayor of Istanbul before accessing the highest steps of power. A way of warning about a possible and new “boomerang effect”.

Race against time

For his part, Ekrem Imamoglu told the crowd that this trial “summarized the situation in Turkey” : “It started the day they tried to deprive us of our victory in the municipal elections in Istanbul, but they will not succeed”, he hammered, with his usual tone, calm and serene. He has already announced that he will appeal his conviction. The appeal will be suspensive, said one of his lawyers, which means that he will keep his mandate during the examination of his appeal which could take several months. The race against time is therefore engaged, between justice accused by human rights defenders and international organizations of being a political instrument in the hands of President Erdogan and the 52-year-old city councilor, given the winner by all the polls. in the event of a duel between the two men.

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Member of the Republican People’s Party (CHP, nationalist left), Ekrem Imamoglu found himself in the sights of the Ankara regime after inflicting his most humiliating defeat on March 31, 2019 on Mr. Erdogan’s training by winning the town hall of ‘Istanbul, which had been ruled for twenty-five years by the Justice and Development Party (AKP). His election was first canceled by the government, forced to bow three months later in the face of the mobilization of the electorate which offered a larger victory to this opponent still unknown to the general public a few months earlier.

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