Turkey’s Resistance Takes to the Streets
Society is mobilizing on a mass scale against Erdoğan. There are lessons here for the United States.
Author’s Note: I write this piece in solidarity with all those imprisoned for their ideas and political engagement in Turkey and around the world. Among them is my friend and colleague Mehmet Ali Çalışkan, who was arrested alongside Ekrem İmamoğlu last month. Mehmet Ali is someone deeply dedicated to thinking—a principled, hard-working social researcher known for his calm judgment, intellectual integrity, and commitment to public dialogue. His detention is a painful reminder that authoritarian regimes do not only target prominent political figures—they seek to silence the quiet, sustained labor that nurtures critical thought and collective possibility.
On March 23, a Turkish court ordered the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu on corruption charges. He was detained alongside 100 others, including district mayors, municipal officials, journalists, and businesspeople affiliated with the city government. İmamoğlu and his team face accusations of collaborating with the pro-Kurdish DEM Party, which currently holds 57 seats in parliament, in support of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK)—a militant Kurdish organization designated as a terrorist group by both Turkey and the United States. The accusation is fraught with irony, given that the government is itself reportedly holding talks with Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned leader of the PKK.
İmamoğlu’s arrest came amid a broader crackdown following the 2024 local elections. The government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has long used a strategy of post-election capture to consolidate its power, allowing opposition parties to compete at the ballot box only to later use state power to undo the results. The most prominent tool in this strategy has been the dismissal of elected mayors via criminal investigations and their replacement with state-appointed trustees. Since 2016, the government has removed over 150 mayors, mainly from the pro-Kurdish DEM Party in Kurdish-majority areas.
The campaign against İmamoğlu has not been limited to legal charges or party politics. A day before his arrest, his alma mater, Istanbul University—the oldest institution of higher education in Turkey—revoked his diploma, a maneuver that was widely seen as an attempt to render him ineligible for office under a law that prevents people without a university degree from running for president. This was not an isolated incident: over the past decade, universities in Turkey have been systematically transformed into instruments of political enforcement. Critical scholars have been purged, campuses militarized, and student dissent criminalized. This went alongside the dismantling of Turkey’s democracy, which was not achieved by military force but through court rulings, executive orders, police investigations, media control, and the silencing of dissent in schools, universities, and workplaces.
The significance of this moment for Turkey cannot be overstated. İmamoğlu’s arrest feels like yet another breaking point—perhaps the point of no return—that will determine whether Turkey will recover its democracy or slide further toward a Russian-style autocracy. The crackdown sparked an immediate surge of civic resistance in the streets, galvanizing Turkey’s largest protests in over a decade. More than 1,500 people were detained and over 200 were arrested, including journalists. Demonstrations erupted not only in liberal strongholds but also in cities long aligned with the ruling party, signaling a broader crisis of legitimacy for the government. The CHP brought hundreds of thousands of people into the streets for a mass rally—one of the largest in recent memory. It was a powerful demonstration of public outrage and a clear signal of the opposition’s ability to mobilize beyond elections.
At Istanbul University, students gathered to denounce the revocation of İmamoğlu’s diploma. Breaking through police barricades, they took to the streets—an act of defiance that quickly reverberated across campuses nationwide. At Middle East Technical University in Ankara protests were met with a violent police response. Yet students continued to mobilize daily, framing their struggle as part of a longer history of discontent and a demand for democracy and justice.
The best indication of the scale of discontent against Erdoğan came on March 23. The CHP had been scheduled to formally nominate İmamoğlu as its candidate through a party primary—but in response to the diploma incident and his arrest, the party transformed what would have been an internal process into a public act of defiance. Instead of limiting the vote to registered members (numbering just over 1.5 million) the CHP opened the primary to all citizens, inviting solidarity votes from across the political spectrum. Nearly 15 million people participated in this voluntary, symbolic election—an extraordinary show of civic resistance with no legal standing but immense democratic weight. To put this into context: In 2023, Erdoğan secured re-election in a run-off with just under 28 million votes. In a country in which the electoral process is increasingly constrained, the symbolic primary was not just a vote for a candidate—it was a vote for democracy itself.
Erdoğan considers Imamoğlu a threat for several reasons. Imamoğlu’s political ascent began in 2019 when he twice defeated Erdoğan’s handpicked candidate for Istanbul mayor, overturning decades of conservative rule. He achieved this under deeply unfair conditions, with 90% of the media under government control and elections heavily tilted in favor of the ruling party. His victory was made possible by a broad alliance of six opposition parties, unified around the goal of restoring democracy. Although that alliance fell apart after their loss in the 2023 presidential election—securing Erdoğan a third presidential term—İmamoğlu nonetheless won the mayorship again with an even wider margin.
Furthermore, Istanbul sits at the center of Turkey’s political and economic life—and at the heart of Erdoğan’s rise to power. In 1994 he was elected as Istanbul’s mayor under the pro-Islamist Welfare Party. He later co-founded the Justice and Development Party (AKP), which held power in Istanbul for nearly two decades, using municipal resources to build political loyalty, expand his party’s base, and consolidate national influence.
In 2024, the opposition made more historic gains in districts and provinces long considered AKP strongholds. For the first time in history, the CHP received more votes nationwide than the AKP—a landmark shift in Turkish politics and a serious blow to the ruling party’s image of unshakable dominance. Such victories were no accident: they were the result of a deliberate shift to run locally-rooted, broadly appealing candidates capable of bridging ideological, ethnic, and sectarian divides. İmamoğlu promoted a model of grassroots coalition-building that enabled the CHP to win in other major cities long considered Erdoğan strongholds.
Such successes demonstrated that even under authoritarian regimes, local governments remain one of the few spaces where opposition parties are able to compete and wield meaningful power. This is particularly true in Turkey, where national institutions—parliament, judiciary, and media—have been systematically brought under Erdoğan’s control. Even under severe restrictions imposed by the central government on their budgets, municipal governments serve as critical sites of political legitimacy, resource distribution, and grassroots mobilization—as well as one of the last viable platforms for meaningful democratic engagement.
What is unfolding in Turkey today is not simply a domestic power struggle—it is a template that other countries may soon follow. The erosion of democracy has proceeded not through dramatic coups but through incremental steps: a court ruling here, a bureaucratic intervention there. These actions have hollowed out the country’s institutions, leaving behind a dismal landscape for rights and freedoms.
Americans may be tempted to view Turkey’s political crisis as distant or irrelevant. But İmamoğlu’s arrest offers a warning—and perhaps even a preview—of what can unfold when institutions are hollowed out. Similar signs of democratic erosion are now emerging in the United States: the expansion of executive authority, efforts to dismantle the separation of powers, the purging of bureaucrats, and the criminalization of dissent. Turkey proves that when too much power is concentrated in a single office, even winning elections may not protect democratic actors from repression.
And yet, despite all this, new waves and forms of resistance are emerging. People in Turkey are refusing to be silenced further. What began as a response to a single political intervention has turned into a mass mobilization against the government. In a world where authoritarianism is spreading, Turkey’s resistance offers a vital lesson: When national institutions are captured and formal politics is closed, mass mobilization becomes a democratic imperative.
Ayça Alemdaroğlu is a Research Scholar and Associate Director of the Program on Turkey at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, and a Global Fellow at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), specializing in social and political change in Turkey and the Middle East.
Follow Persuasion on X, LinkedIn, and YouTube to keep up with our latest articles, podcasts, and events, as well as updates from excellent writers across our network.
And, to receive pieces like this in your inbox and support our work, subscribe below:
 | A guest post by
|
Too many aging baby boomers remember fondly the antiwar protests of the late 1960s and early 1970s. History is not as kind. The mass protests against the Viet Nam War gave us Richard Nixon and almost certainly a longer US involvement in the war. The lesson learned is that if you are going to take to the streets to protest the Trump administration, do it peacefully and involve more segments of society than just frenetic college students.
Good post about Turkey. Sad, how it's gone gradually autocratic.
As to relevance to America, yes, we can learn from Turkey's experience under Erdogan.