On this Thursday (19/03), Ekrem Imamoglu, leading figure of the Republican
People’s Party (CHP) and current political rival of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan was accused by prosecutors for not only extortion and fraud but also to allegedly have aided the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) which is considered terrorists by Turkey, the EU, UK and the US, after performing notable attacks, specifically a suicide bombing in 2016 which killed 44 people and wounded 155.
Imamoglu, 54 year old politician, was also previously put on trial for offending a public official, in which his hearing, of December 2022, sentenced him to 2 years, 7 months and 15 days imprisonment, together with a political ban in accordance with Article 53 of the Turkish Criminal Code. However, this ban from politics no longer applies once he has appealed to verdict and is pending trial.
In the present days, he has proven to be one of the strongest, if not the strongest, rival of Erdogan, who has been president since 2014. Imamoglu was one of the 100 people, including other politicians, journalists and businessmen, detained by the police, just before he would be selected as a presidential candidate. He has responded to the situation with certain calmness as he remains assured that the Turkish people will respond to “the lies, the conspiracies and the traps”, as Erdogan opposers express in the social media that the action of the prosecutors is “a coup against their next president” even accusing the judiciary of contributions, as they say that democratic votes are no longer possible. Turkish Justice Minister, Yilmaz Tunc, however, has criticised those perspectives, reassuring that such accusations are “extremely dangerous and wrong”, not to mention that nobody is above the law in Turkey. Internationally, the reaction to his imprisonment has also been negative once the Council of Europe stated that Imamoglu’s detention “bears all the hallmarks of the pressure on a political figure considered as one of the main candidates in forthcoming presidential elections”.
It is important to note that the Turkish economy has been impacted by such political transformation, as the Turkish lira briefly crashed to an all-time low against the US dollar as falling by 12% (42 lire per dollar) emphasising concerns about the erosion of the rule of law in the major emerging market and NATO member country that Erdogan has led for many years.
Overall, hopefully, the Turkish judiciary will be able to comfort their people by addressing the current situation in the most adequate manner possible in order to showcase their purpose in maintaining the Turkish best interest.
