Many Turkish men and one Turkish woman

– Where are you going?

– To work.

– Turn around, there's no work today!

– But...

– Do you see my gun? I have orders to shoot in case of resistance. Go home, I said!

Thousands of such dialogues took place in Istanbul this morning. Public transportation stopped in the city, and police stopped private cars, strictly ordering drivers to return home and stay there. The authorities worried in advance about possible mass protests after Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu and 105 other people were arrested on charges of financial support for the terrorist organization PKK (Kurdish Workers' Party). In last year's local elections, 25 of Istanbul's 39 municipalities came under the control of the opposition Republican People's Party. Operation 'Stop Ekrem' began in October 2024 with the arrest of Ahmet Özer, the municipal mayor of Istanbul's Esenyurt district, which is characterized by a population that exceeds many of Turkey's largest cities and is approaching 1 million.

The day before, Turkey's Higher Education Council revoked Ekrem Imamoglu's diploma, thus closing his path to the presidency: a bachelor's degree is required for a candidate for the highest office in the country. Istanbul University, which two years ago was publicly proud of its graduate Imamoglu (there are university posters with photos of the mayor), suddenly agreed with the prosecutor's suspicion that the graduate's diploma was issued illegally 30 years ago.

From this brief disposition, an obvious conclusion follows: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is getting rid of his main rival in the 2028 presidential election. Authoritarianism, usurpation, and the elimination of the remnants of democracy? Is that right? Yes, but with Byzantine details, thanks to which this democracy has not become European, however, without degenerating into Trumpism.

Getting rid of a competitor is only one superficial layer in the multilayered and multifaceted Turkish political life. The old ideological parties, religious orders, sub-ethnic groups, class clubs, and financial holdings behind them are intertwined in many ways, and often their connections are not clear, and the coalitions between them are as unexpected as the architecture of Taksim's parallel alleys that intersect in the most unexpected ways.

On March 23, 2025, Ekrem Imamoglu had every chance of winning the internal party primaries among the 1.6 million members of the Republican People's Party as the official candidate for the Turkish presidency. No one else is running in the primaries except him. A non-alternative election that should have ended with an obvious outcome – the nomination of the Istanbul mayor for president.

Since November 2023, Ataturk's party (CHP) has come under not only political but also financial control of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu. The peculiarities of Turkish legislation prohibit municipal deputies, mayors, or officials from leading national parties. The party leader can only be a member of parliament or a person who does not hold other positions in the public sector. Therefore, after the overthrow of Kemal Kiliçdaroglu, who lost the presidential election in May 2023, Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu decided to keep the chair that controls the budget of Turkey's largest economy. One third of Turkey's trillion-dollar GDP is produced in Istanbul. Therefore, the leader of the party created by Ataturk had to be a local representative and confidant, the long-time party speaker Ozgur Özel.

The non-alternative primaries in the CHP were a signal from the party leadership to the internal party dissatisfiers and all other opponents of the government: if you want to change Erdogan, there is only one address: Bashkan Ekrem. But in addition to the internal party opposition, united around the deposed Kiliçdaroglu, a new conditionally nationalist wing has grown stronger in the party, led by Ankara Mayor Mansur Yavaş.

Both mayors of the two main Turkish cities took their positions from Erdogan's proteges in the 2019 elections. Both were nominated for these positions by the deposed Kiliçdaroglu. Both were relatively safe for the government, as neither Ekrem Bey in Istanbul nor Mansur Bey in Ankara had a majority in the city councils after winning the mayoralty. Erdogan's Justice and Development Party was able to retain the deputy corps in both cities, which meant that budgetary flows were under the tight control of the central government.

The 2024 local elections changed the situation. The opposition marched victoriously across Turkey, and the municipalities of both capitals came under the control of two popular mayors. In Istanbul, Imamoglu agreed to a deep informal coalition with the Kurds to win. The already mentioned first detainee, the mayor of Esenyurt, Ahmet Özer, is an example of such cooperation. A professor of Kurdish origin with ties to all Kurdish movements in Turkey and abroad, he was elected by a union of Kurdish and secular voices in the nine-hundred-thousand-strong Istanbul district.

Ankara Mayor Mansur Yavaş, on the other hand, distances himself from any attempts to cooperate with former separatists and limits himself to formal relations with all others who do not belong to the People's Republicans. Yavaş did not attend the protests in support of the arrested Ahmet Özer, and avoided the mayor's rally and other public events supported by Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu. There has never been a public altercation between them. In front of the cameras, both mayors demonstrate the famous Turkish politeness and send each other compliments as sweet as baklava of Antep. But all of these details are exactly the obvious messages that the two leaders are sending to their supporters after the Istanbul mayor became the party's majority shareholder.

Erdogan's interests in this scheme are to temporarily deprive the main opposition candidate of the opportunity to strengthen the Ankara group. The twelfth president of Turkey is facing a difficult choice. He wants to remain in power, but to do so, he must agree to early elections by the decision of the parliament, which still lacks the votes. The Constitution, cleverly formulated in 2017, allows the president and parliament to call new elections without explanation (the word «early» has officially disappeared from the Basic Law).

If «new elections» are announced by the head of state, his term is considered over, and he loses the right to participate in the next ones, having served two terms. Erdogan's current third term became possible precisely because it is considered the second. If the parliament finds 360 (three-fifths) of the constitutional composition of the Mejlis for «new elections», the president, as the injured party, receives a constitutional bonus. His current term is considered unexpired and he can run again.

This tricky Turkish arithmetic was criticized at the project stage in 2016, when, after a coup attempt, Erdogan suddenly decided that only a strong presidential republic would save the country from the conspirators. Constitutionalists warned that in the presence of a controlled parliament, a president elected for 5 years could call «new elections» every 4 years with the help of his deputies, turning the second term into an endlessly unused one. Suffer and receive bonuses forever. Provided that he does not lose control of the parliament. Now, to implement this scheme, he lacks literally a few dozen votes, which can be given in gratitude for the release from solitary confinement of the country's number one terrorist, Abdullah Ocalan.

The second way for Erdogan is not to irritate Turkish society with fictitious schemes to extend his powers. Turkish society is explosive and vindictive. The history of almost all the sultans and many presidents and prime ministers is associated not only with coups by the janissaries or the army, but also with unexpected uprisings in the Ottoman period and unexpected election results in the republican period. The Turkish authorities knew how to pacify popular unrest, but they never dared to rewrite the voting results.

The option of leaving but retaining a reliable candidate is gradually emerging. Former head of the MIT intelligence service Hakan Fidan, who spent 15 years in Erdogan's shadow, became Turkey's foreign minister in 2023 and is now the most public politician for both the domestic market and exports. Operation Successor vaguely resembles the Russian scheme of transferring power from Yeltsin to Putin. But in Turkish conditions, Fidan is not a 100% guarantee of success.

That is why Erdogan is preparing for the third, least pleasant option – the victory of the opposition. In this case, it is not only about the security of Erdogan and his entourage after 25 years on the sultan's throne. At stake is the integrity and security of the country in the face of a threatening Russia and unstable Arab neighbors whose territories bordering Turkey are inhabited by millions of Kurds.

Erdogan's experience of cooperation with Kurdish forces in 2013 showed that guerrilla fighters are becoming more active behind them, and recently submissive mayors of Kurdish cities in Turkey are beginning to declare autonomy, dig trenches in the southeast of the country and break through the border with Iraq and Syria. Kurdish human rights history goes hand in hand with armed separatists, and in Ekrem Imamoglu, not only Erdogan, but the entire center-right and patriotic Turkish opposition does not see a leader capable of keeping the country from disintegrating if he comes to power.

That is why Ankara Mayor Mansur Yavaş, whom Erdogan tried to oust from office in 2019-2021, is now a relatively acceptable figure. Yavaş is an Ataturkist nationalist who is able to keep the Southeast from a wave of new violence and maintain a balance of interests between different groups within the country. Equally important is the external vector that the two mayors will choose if one of them comes to power.

Imamoglu is almost a true social democrat, surrounded not only by businessmen but also by the extreme left-wing currents of the Turkish west and Kurdish east. The love for Russia in this environment is hidden behind personal criticism of Putin's exciting war. But no one has canceled cultural diplomacy in Turkey. The most secular lovers of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are still considered the country's only intellectuals, and behind the portraits of Ataturk in their offices, one is likely to find Lenin's bald head and Stalin's mustache.

Mansur Yavaş is a new type of republican who supports secular principles at the level of society, but in his personal life he adheres to the precepts of Islam. For this group of «new rightists», Russia is a constant enemy, if not an enemy, oppressing most of the Turkic peoples.

In this almost entirely male story, the key figure is a woman: Meral Akşener, who created the Good Party by taking a large part of the nationalists from Devlet Bahçeli. Last year, after a crushing election defeat, Meral Akşener publicly retired from politics. She was the one who slammed the door at the opposition coalition meeting in early 2023, considering Kiliçdaroglu's nomination against Erdogan to be the most unfortunate choice of the opposition. She was accused of playing along with Erdogan and returned to the opposition «table of six» a day later, actively participating in the opposition candidate's campaign.

Akşener insisted that one of the two mayors, Ekremoglu or Yavaş, should become the presidential candidate, and in a fit of emotion, she called both of them cowards who were unable to look at the simulation of the second round for the sake of the country's interests and convince their boss not to get involved in a campaign that was obviously losing.

Now this woman has moved to Ankara without a job and rented an office. She does not give interviews and avoids public gatherings. But from time to time, information leaks into the public space that all the key players are looking for meetings with Akşener: from the lawyers of Kurdish leader Demirtaş to President Erdogan himself.

And if she has relied on Mansur Yavaş as the most favorable opponent to the current president, then as a former interior minister, she is one of the few who is able to develop a sophisticated plan to get rid of competitors.

And while I was writing this text, it turned out that all the strict morning precautions were in vain: in the evening, tens of thousands of protesters outraged by the arrests came to Istanbul City Hall.