Early in the morning on March 19, dozens of armed police officers showed up at my door with a detention order. The scene resembled the capture of a terrorist, not of the elected mayor of Istanbul, Turkey’s largest city.
The move — four days before my party, the Republican People’s Party, was to hold a primary for the next presidential race — was dramatic but hardly unexpected. It followed months of escalating legal harassment of me, culminating in the abrupt revocation of my university diploma 31 years after I had graduated. Authorities seemed to believe this would disqualify me from the race because the constitution requires the president to have a degree in higher education.
Realizing he cannot defeat me at the ballot box, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has resorted to other means: having his main political opponent arrested on charges of corruption, bribery, leading a criminal network and aiding the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, even though the charges lack credible evidence. I was suspended from my elected office over the financial charges.
For years, Mr. Erdogan’s regime has gnawed away at democratic checks and balances — silencing the media, replacing elected mayors with bureaucrats, sidelining the legislature, controlling the judiciary and manipulating elections. The large-scale arrests of protesters and journalists in recent months have sent a chilling message: No one is safe. Votes can be nullified and freedoms can be stripped away in an instant. Under Mr. Erdogan, the republic has been transformed into a republic of fear.
This is more than the slow erosion of democracy. It is the deliberate dismantling of our republic’s institutional foundations. My detention marked a new phase in Turkey’s slide into authoritarianism and the use of arbitrary power. A country with a long democratic tradition now faces the serious risk of passing the point of no return.
The crackdown extended beyond me. In a sweeping operation built on an indictment that is no more than a compilation of statements by secret witnesses, the police detained nearly 100 people, including senior municipal administrators and business figures. Disinformation and defamation campaigns in pro-government media preceded the detentions.
Yet the people of Turkey responded with defiance. Despite a ban on protests and roadblocks on key entryways into cities, hundreds of thousands of citizens from Istanbul to the northeastern city of Rize, traditionally an Erdogan stronghold, took to the streets. Within hours and into the following days of my detention, people from all ages and backgrounds joined my party. Outside Istanbul’s municipal headquarters, people held vigils despite increasingly harsh measures and arrests.
Despite the crackdown, the Republican People’s Party successfully held its presidential primary on Sunday. The party’s tally showed that 15 million people, including 1.7 million registered party members, cast their votes for me as the party’s presidential candidate.
Since my election as mayor in 2019, I have faced nearly 100 investigations and a dozen court cases. From the implausible to the absurd, each charge has been part of a broader effort to wear me down, bar me from serving the people who elected me, remove me from office and eliminate me as a rival to Mr. Erdogan.
I have already run against candidates backed by Mr. Erdogan three times — twice in local elections for Istanbul in 2019 and once again last year — where he personally campaigned against me. I won every time. Now unable to defeat me in elections, he is using his grip on the judiciary to sideline a challenger who, according to recent polls, could win if the elections were held today.
So why did so many people take to the streets in the largest demonstrations since the Gezi Park protests in 2013?
Amid mounting injustice and a troubled economy, public frustration in Turkey has reached a boiling point. People are speaking out and rallying around me, a candidate who promises inclusion, justice and the hope of a better future. They will not be silenced. But the public also recognized my arrest as an attempt to push Turkey further down the path of autocracy.
Even in repression, signs of solidarity endure. Social democratic leaders and mayors across Turkey and beyond, from Amsterdam to Zagreb, demonstrated their support, with courage and principle, after my arrest. Civil society, too, has not wavered. But central governments around the world? Their silence is deafening. Washington merely expressed “concerns regarding recent arrests and protests” in Turkey. With few exceptions, European leaders have failed to offer a strong response.
What is happening in Turkey and many other parts of the world demonstrates that democracy, the rule of law and fundamental freedoms cannot survive in silence, nor be sacrificed for diplomatic convenience disguised as “realpolitik.”
Undeniably, recent events — Russia’s war in Ukraine, the overthrow of the al-Assad regime in our neighbor Syria and the devastation in Gaza — have enhanced Turkey’s strategic importance, not least given its critical capacity to help with European security. However, geopolitics should not blind us to the erosion of values, particularly human rights violations. Otherwise, we legitimize those who are dismantling the global rules-based order piece by piece.
The survival of democracy in Turkey is crucial not just for its people but also for the future of democracy worldwide. The age of the unchecked strongmen demands that those who believe in democracy be just as vocal, forceful and unrelenting as their opponents. Democracy’s fate depends on the courage of students, workers, other citizens, unions and elected officials — those who refuse to remain silent when institutions crumble. I have faith in the people of Turkey and beyond who fight for justice and democracy.
