Erdogans Last Gambit: why he imprisoned his political adversary, is accompanied by demonstrators | News explained

Imamoglu, the most eminent political rival of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was arrested for corruption, fraud, organized crime and terrorism according to the Anadolu agency in Turkeys, and its mayor of the largest city in the country was dismissed.

Imamoglu has long been considered a potential alternative to Erdogan, of which the Justice and Development Party (AKP) has ruled Turkey since 2002. The demonstrations against the arrest of Imamoglus have refused to go out. On Thursday, the Minister of the Interior of Dindes said that nearly 1,900 demonstrators had been arrested in the previous eight days, and 260 of them had been imprisoned by the courts.

Why did the Erdogans government disappear at Imamoglu at the moment?

Authoritarianism inside

Erdogan first took power as Prime Minister in 2003, at the head of the emerging AKP, a party born of the three decades of the Islamist conservative political actors against a secular Kemalist elite establishment.

Reining in the army: Shortly after his coming to power, Erdogan made a political bet to reduce the power of the military, who was the spearhead of rooted turkeys. To report the AKPS preference for a pro-Western conservative democratic position instead of Islamism, he chose a pro-EU program as a political priority. Membership of the European Union, however, required a decrease in the role of soldiers in Turkish policy.

He also embarked on zero-problems with Neighburs, who has undermined the oversized role of Turkish military in countries. This motto of foreign policy guided the turkey courtesy the assads of Damascus, despite their strong anti-Islamist and anti-Muslim reputation.

In 2011, after its pro-reform program allowed the defeat of the army and the establishment of an effective monopoly on power, Erdogan was ready to move to a brand of populist Islamist policy.

While the Arab Spring swept the region and the Arab regimes fell around it (yielding, in some cases like Egypt, to the diets supported by the Muslim Brotherhood), Turkey has thrown its weight behind the anti-Assad opposition in Syria. In 2016, the use of Islamism, of Erdogans, pushed the sections of the Turkish army to try an armed coup whose failure allowed Erdogan to monopolize power more.

Follow the judiciary: Since the failure of the coup attempt, Erdogan has also made concerted efforts to attack and weaken the judiciary with significant success.

Between 2016 and 2019, around 4,000 judges were purged. In 2019, the dramatic trial of Kurdish women's politicians Gultan Kisanak and Sebahat Tunncel saw 16 judges running in panels of three members for twelve sessions, which makes the defense sustained impossible. Kisanak and Tncel were declared terrorists and imprisoned; They were released in May of last year.

A Reuters investigation in 2020 had exposed the Turkish judicial will to follow the line of governments; Five years later, the judiciary this month actively allowed the State to arrest Imamoglu.

In the 1970s, the lawyer then secular judicial had continued and ultimately disqualified the country for the first openly Islamist the National Party of the Order, founded by Necmettin Erbakan, one of the most eminent mentors of Erdogans and its three successors. The imprisonment of the greatest rival in Erdogans indicates that the magistrates are buckling the loop in the service of political power.

A geopolitical moment

The real and perceived threats of the Kurdish workers' party (PKK) have long guided Turkish policy abroad and helped the authoritarian project of Erdogans.

The Turkish government has blamed the group, which is active in areas dominated by Kurds in Iraq, Syria and Turkey, for several terrorist attacks in the country riding its rhetoric insofar as American and Arabic support for Kurdish militias such as democratic Syrian relations (SDF) against Turcole Relations from damage to the partner.

Once Assad had established a domination over Syria with Russian aid at the end of 2019, Erdogan negotiated Moscow and Damascus to prevent large -scale offensives against Islamist opposition groups in Idlib and Northern Syria controlled by turquies, which Ankara considered a stamp against the SDF combatants. The extent of the support that Turkey brought to groups based in Idlib such as the Syrian National Army and the Hayat Tahrir Al-Shaam became clear in December 2024 when these groups led Assad of power and Syria.

The victory of turkeys of turkeys in Syria has since been softened by Trump's administrations which are lacking in interest in reinstating Erdogans' authoritarianism and focusing on the reduction of support for the SDF Syrian Kurdish.

Efforts to protect democracy in Türkiye are no longer at the top of the agenda in Europe either. While the EU is struggling with the dramatic American Volte against Ukraine and the safety ramifications of the transatlantic alliance of the Ankaras’s stock increased.

The situation changed in the Dinde district opened the place in Erdogan in an attempt to dismantle his domestic opposition three years before the elections. He hoped that the economy rebounds in the meantime and that pro-imaguing feelings dissipate. He would make confidence in the fact that he survived the much larger demonstrations of the Gezi Park in 2013 (with more than 3 million participants) at a time when the Turkish economy slowed down.

Bashir Ali Abbas is main research partner with strategic and defense research council, New Delhi