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Tens of thousands of people have protested in the Turkish capital, Ankara, against a court case that could oust the head of the main opposition on Monday after a year-long legal crackdown on hundreds of its members.
Live footage showed crowds chanting for President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s resignation while waving Turkish flags and party banners.
The court decision on Monday whether to invalidate the 2023 congress of the Republican People’s party (CHP) over alleged procedural irregularities could reshape the party, rattle financial markets and influence the timing of a general election set for 2028. The court could also delay the ruling.
Speaking at Sunday’s rally, the CHP leader, Özgür Özel, said the government was trying to cling to power by undermining democratic norms and suppressing dissent after opposition victories in local elections over the past year.
Özel also called for a snap general election. “This case is political. The accusations are slander. Our comrades are innocent. What’s being done is a coup – a coup against the future president, against the future government. We will resist, we will resist, we will resist,” he said in his address to the crowd.
The government says the judiciary is independent and denies any political motives.
Turkey has detained more than 500 people, including 17 mayors, over the last year in Istanbul and other CHP-run municipalities around the country as part of corruption investigations, according to a Reuters review.
Hundreds of members of the CHP have been jailed pending trial in a sprawling investigation into alleged corruption and terrorism links, among them Erdoğan’s main political rival, Istanbul’s mayor, Ekrem İmamoğlu.
The arrest of İmamoğlu in March sparked the country’s largest protests in a decade where hundreds of thousands took to the streets, prompting a brief but sharp sell-off in the lira and other Turkish assets.
In a letter sent from prison and read aloud at the rally in Ankara, İmamoğlu wrote that the government was attempting to predetermine the outcome of the next election by sidelining legitimate rivals. He also accused the government of undermining democracy through politically motivated judicial actions and other efforts to suppress dissent.
“The era of ‘I’ in this country will end, and the era of ‘we’ will begin. One person will lose, and everyone else will win,” İmamoğlu wrote. The crowd applauded and chanted “President İmamoğlu” after the letter was read aloud.
