Twelve years after a massive revolt shook the Turkish government to its core, masses of people throughout the country are rising up again to defy authoritarian backsliding. The earlier movement had taken its name from Gezi Park, the last central green space in Istanbul and site of a pitched battle against corporate takeover, while the current revolt was sparked by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s blatant attempt to erase the last vestiges of a fair election by arresting Ekrem İmamoğlu, the mayor of Istanbul. The fact that students are leading the movement puts the mainstream opposition to shame — and presents opportunities to build a new future.
The mayor has been a thorn in the side of Erdoğan since his local election victory of 2019, a major setback for the ruling party. Five years later, İmamoğlu would win a second term with an expanded margin. These developments threatened Erdoğan’s agenda of authoritarian centralization, which has reduced the role of elections to tightly controlled referenda on the one-man regime. As protests picked up pace, however, it became clear that İmamoğlu’s repression set fire to a powder keg of discontent, enrapturing the generation that grew up under the shadow of far-right rule.
After scraping by to reach a parliamentary majority and another Erdoğan presidency in 2023, the government had been following its neoliberal-Islamic agenda with relatively little disturbance until the upset of the 2024 local elections. Assaults on free secular public education were ramped up as many public schools were turned…
Auteur: Onur Acaroğlu
