ISTANBUL: Vast crowds of students surged onto Istanbul’s streets Monday in the latest protest over the arrest and jailing of Istanbul’s opposition mayor that has sparked Turkey’s worst unrest in years.
The demonstrations began after Ekrem Imamoglu’s March 19 arrest and have since spread to at least 55 of Turkey’s 81 provinces, sparking clashes with riot police and drawing international condemnation.
Police have arrested more than 1,130 people over the past six days, including 43 on Monday night, the interior minister said. Among them are journalists, including an AFP photographer.
Imamoglu, 53, of the opposition CHP party, is widely seen as the only politician capable of defeating Turkey’s longtime leader Erdogan at the ballot box.
In just four days he went from being the mayor of Istanbul — a post that launched Erdogan’s political rise decades earlier — to being arrested, interrogated, jailed and stripped of the mayorship as a result of a graft and terror probe.
On Monday, students in both Istanbul and the capital Ankara began gathering in the early afternoon after announcing they were boycotting lectures at the main universities in both cities.
In Istanbul, as crowds of chanting, flag-waving students headed through the streets to Besiktas, a port on the Bosphorus, residents applauded and banged saucepans in a show of support, AFP correspondents said.
After rallying by the port, the students began marching along the coast towards the historic peninsula to join the nightly protest outside City Hall, an correspondent said.
“This is not a meeting, this is an act of defiance against fascism!” CHP leader Ozgur Ozel told the vast crowd, which held up a sea of banners including one aimed at Erdogan that read “Palaces are yours, the streets are ours.”
Ozel also called for a boycott of pro-government TV channels that have not been broadcasting images of the protests as well as other businesses known to be close to the government, including a chain of cafes.
After meeting his cabinet on Monday, Erdogan once again accused the opposition of provoking the protests.
“Stop playing with the nation’s nerves,” he said, while also insisting that everything was under control with the Turkish economy, saying the government had “successfully managed the last market fluctuation”.
The move against Imamoglu has badly hurt the lira and caused chaos on Turkey’s financial markets.
The benchmark BIST 100 stock index closed nearly 8.0 percent lower on Friday but recovered somewhat on Monday, ending the session around 3.0 percent higher.
On Sunday, Imamoglu was overwhelmingly chosen as the CHP’s candidate for a 2028 presidential run, with observers saying it was the looming primary that triggered the move against him.
