By AFP
March 29, 2025
Students have kept up their protests, despite a growing police crackdown
Protesters were to join a mass rally in Istanbul Saturday at the call of Turkey’s main opposition CHP over the jailing of the city’s mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, a top figure in the party whose arrest has sparked 10 days of the country’s biggest street demonstrations in a decade.
Imamoglu’s detention on March 19 has also prompted a repressive government response that has been sharply condemned by rights groups and drawn criticism from abroad.
The rally, which begins at 0900 GMT in Maltepe on the Asian side of Istanbul, is the first such CHP-led gathering since Tuesday and comes on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration marking the end of Ramadan, which starts Sunday.
Widely seen as the only Turkish politician capable of challenging President Recep Tayyip Erdogan at the ballot box, Imamoglu was elected as the CHP’s candidate for the 2028 presidential race on the day he was jailed.
“Imamoglu’s candidacy for president is the beginning of a journey that will guarantee justice and the nation’s sovereignty. Let’s go to Maltepe.. and start our march to power together!” CHP leader Ozgur Ozel said on X.
The protests over his arrest quickly spread across Turkey, with vast crowds joining mass nightly rallies outside Istanbul City Hall called by the CHP, that often degenerated into running battles with riot police.
Although the last such rally was Tuesday, student groups have kept up their own protests, most of them masked despite a police crackdown that has seen nearly 2,000 people arrested.
Among them were 20 minors who were arrested between March 22-25, of whom seven remained in custody, the Istanbul Bar Association said Friday.
In Istanbul, at least 511 students were detained, many in predawn raids, of whom 275 were jailed, lawyer Ferhat Guzel told AFP, while admitting that the number was “probably much higher”.
The authorities have also cracked down on media coverage, arresting 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deporting a BBC correspondent and arresting a Swedish reporter who flew into Istanbul to cover the unrest.
Although 11 journalists were freed Thursday, among them AFP photographer Yasin Akgul, two more were detained on Friday as was Imamoglu’s lawyer Mehmet Pehlivan, who was later granted conditional release.
Swedish journalist Joakim Medin, who flew into Turkey on Thursday to cover the demonstrations, was jailed on Friday, his employer Dagens ETC told AFP, saying it was not immediately clear what the charges were.
– ‘Accusations 100 percent false’ –
Unconfirmed reports in the Turkish media said Medin was being held for “insulting the president” and belonging to a “terror organisation”.
“I know that these accusations are false, 100 percent false,” Dagens ETC’s editor-in-chief Andreas Gustavsson wrote on X account.
In a post on social media, Swedish Foreign Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard said Stockholm was taking his arrest “seriously”.
Turkish authorities held BBC journalist Mark Lowen for 17 hours on Wednesday before deporting him on the grounds he posed “a threat to public order”, the broadcaster said.
Turkey’s communications directorate put his deportation down to “a lack of accreditation”.
Baris Altintas, co-director of MLSA, the legal NGO helping many of the detainees, told AFP the authorities “seem to be very determined on limiting coverage of the protests.
“As such, we fear that the crackdown on the press will not only continue but also increase.”
burs-hmw/ach
Opinion
(RNS) — Erdoğan's arrest of the Istanbul mayor is aimed at quelling an increasingly vocal political opposition. But Ekrem İmamoğlu is also indispensable to the Turkish president as a symbol of religious toleration — and a foil to Erdoğan's Islamist ideal.
Demonstrators shout slogans during a protest after Istanbul's Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu was arrested and sent to prison, in Istanbul, Turkey, Tuesday, March 25, 2025. (AP Photo/Francisco Seco)
Katherine Kelaidis
March 28, 2025
(RNS) — Earlier this month, the now-former mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem İmamoğlu, was arrested on corruption charges along with 100 other opposition leaders. The arrests have provoked massive demonstrations across the country, not least because many Turks believe the arrests are a thinly veiled crackdown by Turkish strongman President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on the increasingly popular opposition as a 2028 general election approaches. İmamoğlu is by far the most prominent of those opposition figures.
The conflict in Turkey in many ways mirrors the domestic tensions playing out in many parts of the world, as the rising tide of authoritarianism does battle against the liberal world order. Turkey’s history and geopolitical position makes its post-postmodern struggle unique, but also of wider concern. With the fate of religious pluralism in the Balkans and (one might argue) the very survival of Christianity in the Middle East in question, the outcome of Turkey’s political conflict is important for most anyone west of Moscow.
For nearly a century after Mustafa Kemal Atatürk invented the modern Turkish state, Turkey was not just secular, but aggressively secular. One of the “six arrows” of Kemalist ideology was the stringently areligious civic life the French call laïcité. If anything Turkey’s version outdid that of France, particularly in its anti-clericalism. The Kemalist consensus began to crumble at the end of the 20th century, however, and the election of Erdoğan to the presidency in 2014 (after 11 years as prime minister) marked what many believed would be the end of its dominance in Turkey.
RELATED: Authoritarian movements depend on political religions — not least in America
This was due in part to Erdoğan’s purported moderate Islamist leanings. In fact, like many budding strongmen of our era, Erdoğan exhibits no particular ideology beyond his own power, but he did recognize the growing power of Islamist factions in the country and has curried favor with them. In 2020, for instance, he oversaw the reconversion of the Hagia Sophia into a mosque after its 85 years as a museum.
Modern Islamism and the Ottoman past have also shaped Erdoğan’s foreign policy and soft power strategy. Turkey has funded the building of mosques throughout the Balkans and eastern Mediterranean, including the new Turkish-funded Namazgah Mosque that Erdoğan personally inaugurated in Tirana, Albania, last year, and the massive Ottoman-style mosque in the disputed territory of Northern Cyprus completed in 2018. From Syria to Gaza to Kosovo, Erdoğan has sought to position Turkey as an explicitly Muslim state and himself as the leader of the Muslim world.
The effects for Turkey’s religious minority communities — most notably its significant Christian community — has been devastating. Turkey regularly appears on human rights watch lists, often for violations of religious freedom.
The opposition has seized on this human rights record. The Republican People’s Party, the oldest political party in Turkey, founded by Kemal Atatürk himself, still holds onto its founder’s radical laïcité. İmamoğlu has been so vocal in his support of Istanbul’s Greek Orthodox minority that Erdoğan attacked him in a 2019 speech as a “crypto Greek” and his supporters as Greeks “disguised as Muslims.” An Erdoğan deputy has said there are “many questions” about İmamoğlu’s ethnic and religious identity.
İmamoğlu’s response to these attacks reflect his own commitment to pluralism and the Kemalist tradition, telling The Times, “If I were of Greek origin, I wouldn’t mind to say so… I also condemn people who think they are degrading someone by calling them Greek.”
But the fact that such a response was even necessary highlights what is at stake for Turkey’s religious and ethnic minorities and for the future of religious freedom. Erdoğan still envisions Turkey as a place that has no room for non-Muslim Turks, precisely because his personal opportunities rest on the existence of the quintessential “other” — and for the Ottomanist, that other is still, as it has been for centuries, the Greek.
If Erdoğan is allowed to triumph in his battle against the more tolerant İmamoğlu, the fate of Turkey’s minority groups will inevitably be a darker one. Its dwindling Christian community is watching closely as Ottamanist rhetoric and Islamic policies put them directly in the crossfire. The world must wait to see if the Turkey that emerges from this conflict is Atatürk’s pluralist and secular dream or an Ottoman-inspired authoritarian and nationalist nightmare.
(Katherine Kelaidis, a research associate at the Institute of Orthodox Christian Studies in Cambridge, England, is the author of “Holy Russia? Holy War?” and the forthcoming “The Fourth Reformation.” The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of RNS.)
Turkey and the neofascist contagion
First published in Arabic at Al-Quds al-Arabi. Translation from Gilbert Achcar's blog.
The events unfolding in Turkey since last Wednesday are extremely serious: they constitute a new and very dangerous step in the country’s slide towards the suffocation of democracy. The arrest of Ekrem Imamoglu — the popular mayor of Istanbul and candidate of his party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), to the next presidential election scheduled for 2028 — and the detention of nearly 100 of his collaborators in the municipality of Turkey’s largest city, on charges that combine corruption (the Turkish judiciary should have better investigated corruption in Erdogan’s entourage, starting with his son-in-law) and links to “terrorism”, i.e., contact with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, PKK (at a time when the government is negotiating with this party for a peaceful settlement), is behaviour straight out of the familiar playbook of dictatorships.
If anyone had any doubt that the charges were fabricated and that the intent was to eliminate the strongest opposition figure to the rule of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who seems determined to rule his country for life like other autocratic rulers, Istanbul University’s decision to invalidate Imamoglu’s degree on the eve of his arrest leaves no room for doubt. A university degree is one of the requirements for running for president in Turkey, and the university’s decision was based on a completely flimsy pretext, especially since Imamoglu received his degree thirty years ago!
Almost a year ago, in the aftermath of the last municipal elections in Turkey, I recalled Erdogan’s role in establishing democracy in his country during the first decade of his rule. Despite his subsequent autocratic drift, including by dismissing those leaders of his party whom he perceived as rivals, I praised his acknowledgement of his party’s defeat in the municipal elections, which distinguished him from several neofascists who do not accept defeat, including Donald Trump who tried to overthrow the electoral process that took place in the autumn of 2020, and still refuses to acknowledge his loss, claiming that the presidency was stolen from him (“Two Valuable Lessons from the Turkish Elections”, 2 April 2024, in Arabic only).
The moral of this story is that the same man who began his political career with a courageous struggle against a dictatorial regime, and who, during his tenure as mayor of Istanbul, suffered what is very similar to what he is now inflicting on his opponent, the current mayor — this man, who played a commendable role in establishing democracy in his country, has been led by the intoxication of power and the enjoyment of a great popularity, to desire to perpetuate this condition, even if by imposing it coercively at the expense of democracy. And yet, until last year, Erdogan did not cross the qualitative red line separating the preservation of a margin of freedom that allows democracy to survive, albeit with increasing difficulty, and encroaching upon this margin in a dictatorial manner.
This was despite the fact that Erdogan exhibits some neofascist characteristics, by relying on an “aggressive, militant mobilization of [his] popular base” on an ideological ground that incorporates some of the key components of far-right ideology, including nationalist and ethnic fanaticism against the Kurds (in particular), sexism, and hostility, in the name of religion or otherwise, to various liberal values (see “The Age of Neo-Fascism and Its Distinctive Features”, 4 February 2025). His current drift suggests that he is now completing his adherence to the ranks of neofascist regimes with regard to their stance on democracy. In the aforementioned article, I described this stance as follows: “Neofascism claims to respect the basic rules of democracy instead of establishing a naked dictatorship as its predecessor did, even when it empties democracy of its content by eroding actual political freedoms to varying degrees, depending on the true level of popularity of each neofascist ruler (and thus his need or not to rig elections) and the balance of power between him and his opponents.”
There are two main factors behind Erdogan’s drift towards neofascism. The first is that the neofascist temptation increases whenever an authoritarian ruler faces rising opposition and fears losing power by way of democracy. Vladimir Putin provides an example of this in that his drift intensified when he faced rising popular opposition upon his return to the presidency in 2012 (after a charade of transferring to the prime ministership in compliance with the constitution, which at the time prohibited more than two consecutive presidential terms). At the same time, Putin resorted to inciting nationalist sentiment towards Ukraine (in particular), just as Erdogan later did towards the Kurds.
The second, and crucial, factor is the rise of neofascism to power in the United States, represented by Donald Trump. This has provided a powerful incentive for the strengthening of various forms of actual or latent neofascism, as we clearly see in Israel, Hungary and Serbia, for example, and as we will increasingly witness globally. The strength of the neofascist contagion is proportional to the strength of the main neofascist pole: the fascist contagion was greatly strengthened, particularly on the European continent, when Nazi Germany’s power went on the rise in the 1930s. The neofascist contagion has become even stronger today, with the United States shifting from a role of deterrent to the erosion of democracy, albeit within obvious limits, to encouraging this erosion, directly or indirectly. The erosion is already underway and accelerating within the United States itself.
It is thus no coincidence that Erdogan’s attack on the opposition began following a phone call between him and Trump, which Steve Witkoff, Trump’s close friend and envoy to various negotiations, described last Friday as “great” and “really transformational”. Witkoff added that “President [Trump] has a relationship with Erdogan and that’s going to be important. And there’s some good coming — just a lot of good, positive news coming out of Turkey right now as a result of that conversation. So I think you’ll see that in the reporting in the coming days.” (Witkoff’s statement was made two days after Imamoglu’s arrest, even if he was not necessarily referring to that arrest.) Moreover, Erdogan believed he has succeeded in neutralizing the Kurdish movement through recent compromises, which were blessed by his allies of the Turkish nationalist far right themselves (he was proved wrong: the Kurdish movement came out in support of the opposition and the popular protest). He also believes that the Europeans need him, and his military potential in particular, at this critical juncture for them, so that they would not exert any real pressure on him.
What remains a source of hope in the Turkish case is that Erdogan is facing a popular backlash far beyond what he apparently anticipated. This mass backlash is far greater than what Putin faced in Russia, where the popular movement was atrophied after decades of totalitarian rule. It is far greater than what most of the pioneers of neofascism have been confronted with, including Trump, who has met only very weak opposition from the Democratic Party since his second election. Erdogan is attempting to quash the popular movement by escalating repression (the number of detainees is approaching 1,500 in a country with a prison population of 400,000, including a high percentage of political prisoners and many journalists) at the expense of Turkey’s security, stability, and economy (the Central Bank was forced to spend $14 billion to avoid a complete collapse of the Turkish lira, and the stock market has experienced a sharp decline).
The ongoing battle in Turkey has become increasingly significant for the entire world. Either Erdogan succeeds in eliminating the opposition, which could require a bloody crackdown similar to Bashar al-Assad’s suppression of the Syrian popular uprising in 2011, thus risking the country’s slide into civil war, or the popular movement will prevail, causing him to backtrack or fall one way or another. If the Turkish popular movement wins, its victory will have a significant impact in galvanizing resistance to the rise of neofascism worldwide.
Turkey: Defend democracy and the rule of law!
MARCH 27, 2025
By Fatma Nur Yoğuran
The cancellation of the diploma of Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu and his subsequent detention have had a wide repercussion on the public and have led to widespread protests across Turkey. This has created a strong social demand that the principles of democracy and the rule of law must be protected.
Ekrem İmamoğlu is the elected Mayor of Istanbul and a key figure in Turkey’s democratic opposition, who rose to prominence after winning the 2019 municipal elections, defeating the ruling party’s candidate twice, despite significant pressure and interference.
On 19th March 2025, İmamoğlu and over 100 associates were detained by Turkish authorities. His detention is another clear sign of Erdoğan’s deepening autocracy. The Turkish government is silencing opposition voices and dismantling democratic institutions step by step. İmamoğlu represents millions who demand change, justice, and democracy. His arrest is not just about one man — it is about the right of an entire nation to be heard.
“These allegations are politically motivated and baseless,” İmamoğlu’s Legal Team have stated. Critics view the arrest as an attempt to eliminate political rivals ahead of the 2028 elections.
In light of these developments, the Republican People’s Party (CHP) has announced that it will hold a widely attended rally in Maltepe, Istanbul, on Saturday, March 29th, at 12:00. The rally aims to defend democracy, support Ekrem İmamoğlu and increase social awareness against the recent negative action. Attending this rally is a significant opportunity to demonstrate your commitment to democracy and the rule of law, strengthen social solidarity, and make your voice heard against the negativities that are being experienced. Everyone’s contribution is valuable towards Türkiye becoming a more just and democratic country.
London Protest Against Erdoğan’s Autocracy: Stand with Ekrem İmamoğlu
Join us this Saturday at 10 Downing Street at 4pm to protest the unjust arrest of Ekrem İmamoğlu.
Why does this matter?
- Judicial independence is under threat.
- Voters will is being silenced.
- Democratic institutions are at risk.
The case against İmamoğlu is not just about one man—it is about the future of democracy in Turkey.
We, as members and supporters of the Republican People’s Party (CHP) and the Workers’ Party of Turkey (TİP) in the UK, invite everyone to stand in solidarity with those resisting oppression in Turkey. Let’s raise our voices together!
Fatma Nur Yoğuran is CHP England Youth Leader.
—
Labour News Network report: Ismet Aslan released – Trade unionism is not a crime!
Trade unionist Ismet Aslan has been released after six months in prison. The trial will continue, but Ismet will not remain in detention.
Ismet was arrested on October 7th, 2024, along with fellow unionists Giyasettin Yiğit and Yusuf Eminoğlu, charged under Turkey’s anti-terror law, often used against unions and activists. In court, he stated, “I am not a criminal. I am a trade unionist,” explaining his actions as part of his union duties.
A LabourStart campaign helped raise global awareness, with nearly 5,000 supporters showing the power of international solidarity. The next hearing is on July 10th, 2025. We thank everyone who supported the campaign—your solidarity made a difference.
—
Contact your MP to condemn what has been happening in Turkiye. At a time of creeping dictatorship internationally, demand the UK government stand up and take action in support of democracy and the rule of law globally!
Image: University students sit beside anti-riot police during a protest in Istanbul after Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu’s arrest and imprisonment. (AP pic) https://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/highlight/2025/03/25/crackdown-on-opposition-tips-turkey-into-financial-turbulence/ Licence: Attribution 4.0 International CC BY 4.0 Deed
Turkey: a mass movement builds against Erdogan’s power grab
Monday 24 March 2025, by Antoine Larrache, Uraz Aydin
Uraz Aydin answers questions from Antoine Larrache about the mobilization currently building in Turkey after the arrest of the mayor of Istanbul, who is seen as Erdogan’s main rival in the race for the next presidential election.
Can you tell us about the arrest of the mayor of Istanbul?
On the morning of March 19, Ekrem Imamoğlu, the mayor of Istanbul, was taken into custody along with around a hundred other mayoral staff on charges of “corruption” and “connection with terrorism”. The day before, his university degree (obtained 30 years ago) was arbitrarily annulled, with the obvious aim of preventing his candidacy in the next presidential election. Ekrem Imamoğlu, having twice won Istanbul’s municipal elections - in 2019 and 2024 - as a candidate for the CHP (Republican People’s Party, secular center-left), has established himself over time as Erdogan’s main opponent.
On March 23, the CHP was due to hold its “pre-elections” to decide on its candidate for the next ballot, normally scheduled for 2028 but most likely to take place earlier, to allow Erdogan to run one last time. Unless there is a constitutional change, which is also under discussion. The aim of this operation is therefore very clear: to render the main opposition candidate ineligible, criminalize his management of Istanbul’s mayoralty and perhaps even appoint an administrator in place of the elected mayor, as has been happening for several years in the municipalities of Kurdistan, in south-west Turkey.
Can you describe the mobilization in the face of this?
Today is the third day of mobilizations. Every day, the CHP calls for rallies in front of Istanbul City Hall. Tens of thousands of people are taking part. Of course, in addition to CHP members and supporters, all sectors of the opposition are mobilizing, including the radical left, against what has come to be known as the “March 19 coup”.
It’s worth remembering that the country has been living in an atmosphere of permanent repression since the Gezi revolt in 2013. The end of negotiations with the Kurdish movement, the remilitarization of the Kurdish question and the resumption of the war, the attempted coup d’état carried out by Erdogan’s former allies and the state of emergency decreed in its wake, the ban on strikes and the repression of the feminist and LGBTI+ movements are the main milestones in the development of authoritarianism articulated to the construction of an autocratic regime led by Erdogan. We are therefore in a country where mobilizations are rare, where the reflex to protest in the street has become quite unusual and risky for ordinary citizens. But despite this and the ban on rallies in Istanbul, there are major mobilizations and, above all, a spirit of protest that can be felt on the streets, in the workplace, on public transport, and so on.
On the second evening, in many parts of Istanbul and dozens of other cities, citizens came out to protest, with the main slogans “Government resign!”, “Down with the AKP dictatorship!”, “No individual liberation! All together or none of us”.
What is the scale of the mobilization among young people?
Precisely the most important and surprising element is the mobilization of university students. Universities have been depoliticized for years, radical left-wing movements are weak and their capacity for action is drastically reduced. So the current generation of students, while probably having grown up with stories of the Gezi revolt told by their parents, has almost no experience of organizing and mobilizing. This is true even of young revolutionary activists, who have not even had the opportunity to “do their job” in universities.
But despite this, through an “electric jolt” as Rosa Luxembourg1 used to say, a spontaneous radicalism is awakening in the universities. There are, of course, many social-economic (objective) and cultural-ideological (subjective) factors that come together to forge this mobilization. We’ll have to think about that later. But the fact that in a country that is becoming poorer, where it is difficult to find work, that offers no “promise of happiness” to young people, where years of study mean almost nothing on the job market, the fact that a diploma can be cancelled with a simple government pressure on the university is also an element that has probably contributed to achieving this jolt, in a sector of youth that was more or less predisposed to it.
What impact is this student radicalization having on the protests?
I think it’s shaking things up, and forcing the CHP to break out of its pre-constructed opposition patterns. As I said, CHP president Özgür Özel has called for a rally outside Istanbul town hall. But it has to be said that no serious preparations had been made to accommodate tens of thousands of people. The main objective was to call on citizens to vote in the pre-elections on March 23 and thus demonstrate Imamoğlu’s legitimacy against the regime, but also to continue the “fight” at the judicial level, by appealing, etc
Faced with this, the slogans most chanted by young people (who made up the majority of rallies in front of the mayor’s office) were “liberation is in the streets, not in the ballot box” or “resistance is in the streets, not in the ballot box”. Faced with this pressure from young people, who succeeded on several occasions in breaking down police barriers in front of universities, who marched en masse in Ankara to ODTÜ University and clashed with the CRS, who forced the police to send riot intervention vehicles to the universities (notably in Izmir), who refused to disperse at the end of official CHP rallies and wanted to march to Taksim (the historic symbolic site of resistance since the May 1st 1977 massacre to the Gezi uprising), the CHP leadership had to give in. Özgür Özel called on the people to “storm the squares”. “If obstacles are erected in front of us on the basis of an order contrary to the law, overthrow them, without hurting the police,” he added. Which is quite exceptional. Özel also agreed to install a second stand at Saraçhane, for the students.
How can we link this situation with what’s happening in Kurdistan, with the peace “process”?
It’s a very contradictory process, but one we’ve already experienced. Let’s not forget that during the Gezi uprising in 2013, when the west of the country was going up in flames, there were negotiations with Abdullah Öcalan, leader of the PKK. And of course, while the radical opposition to the regime usually came from the Kurdish regions, or from the Kurdish movement, this time their participation is naturally more limited. However, we saw that these two dynamics of contestation had converged in the candidacy of Selahattin Demirtaş, of the left-wing pro-Kurdish HDP party in the 2015 elections.
Today, while once again there is a process of “peace” according to the Kurds, of “disarmament” according to the regime (a facet of which can also be seen in the agreements initiated between Rojava and the new Syrian regime), the Turkish state is conducting a campaign of violent repression against the secular bourgeois opposition, journalists... but also against elements of the Kurdish movement. For the Kurds, the regime wants to show (above all to its own social and electoral base) that it still has its iron fist within its grasp, and that there is no question of negotiation but of “putting an end to terrorism”. As for the imprisonment of Imamoglu and other CHP mayors, if one of the charges is corruption, the other is links with or support for terrorism, since the CHP had forged an informal alliance with the Kurdish movement party in the 2024 municipal elections under the name of “urban consensus”.
Another surprising fact is that all demonstrations and gatherings in Istanbul have been banned except for Newroz, a festival celebrating the arrival of spring in the Middle East and the Caucasus, but which has acquired political-national significance for the Kurdish movement over several decades. So it could be said that Erdogan’s regime is trying to take another, decisive step in the construction of its regime, to reinforce its neo-fascist character by subduing the two biggest “chunks”, the secular bourgeois opposition represented by the CHP/Imamoglu and the Kurdish movement.
In the case of the former, by criminalizing it, imprisoning its representatives, perhaps forcing it to change its leadership and candidate, and finally destroying all legitimacy of the elections. As for the Kurdish movement, the regime will probably try to “de-radicalize” it, making it an ally at national and regional level (Syria, Iraq) in the hope that, in exchange for a few gains (of which no details are known at present), the movement will abandon its fight for the democratization of the entire country and guarantee a more peaceful existence with the regime. For the time being, the Dem Party (formerly HDP) has announced that it strongly opposes this “civil putsch” against Imamoglu and the other elected representatives, and that it is calling on the opposition forces to protest together at the Newroz rally on March 23.
Of course, we can’t anticipate the outcome of Erdogan’s two-pronged strategy, but as the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci once said, only the struggle can be foreseen
March 21 2025
P.S.
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Attached documentsturkey-a-mass-movement-builds-against-erdogan-s-power-grab_a8916.pdf (PDF - 899.5 KiB)
Extraction PDF [->article8916]
Turkey
Turkey and the Neofascist Contagion
Turkish people will not accept the death sentence for their democracy
Kurdistan: ‘Turkey must choose between the status quo, endless war and peace with the Kurds’.
The Turkish State and the Kurdish Question: Contradictions and fragilities of a new hope
Sudan: Towards peace for warlords?
Antoine Larrache
Antoine Larrache is editor of Inprecor and a member of the leadership of the Fourth International
Uraz Aydin
* Uraz Aydin is the editor of Yeniyol, the review of the Turkish section of the Fourth International, and one of many academics dismissed for having signed a petition in favour of peace with the Kurdish people, in the context of the state of emergency decreed after the attempted coup in 2016.
International Viewpoint is published under the responsibility of the Bureau of the Fourth International. Signed articles do not necessarily reflect editorial policy. Articles can be reprinted with acknowledgement, and a live link if possible.
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