For many young Turks, the arrest of Istanbul’s mayor is just the latest in a much broader erosion of democratic norms under Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Thousands of young Turks flooded the streets outside the Istanbul Municipal Palace, waving flags, chanting slogans, and holding signs. Amid the roar, Marmara University student Yusuf Emre Kaya stepped up to a podium overlooking the bright crimson sea of Turkish flags.
“I am a university student who is not a member of any political party, exercising my constitutional right to peacefully protest for the first time in my life,” he told the crowd on that March day.
The spark for this and many other demonstrations across Turkey over the following weeks was the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu.
Kaya’s words resonate with a growing number of young Turks who have grown more politically active since 19 March 2025, when Imamoglu was detained and later charged with several offenses.
Imamoglu’s arrest and the ensuing crackdown of the opposition have come to symbolize what many see as a growing authoritarianism under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Imamoglu’s detention has caused widespread outrage, particularly among younger generations across the political spectrum.
No Coincidence
Imamoglu is charged with a range of crimes from corruption to supporting terrorism. The timing raised alarms: it was already known that his Republican People’s Party (CHP) would select him as its candidate for the 2028 presidential election – as indeed happened just days later – thus bolstering his position as Erdogan’s most formidable political opponent.
Imamoglu and other leading CHP figures have accused state prosecutors of staging a politically motivated campaign against him and the party with no basis in fact.
He first went on trial in 2022, when he was convicted of insulting members of the Supreme Election Council (YSK). If the verdict is upheld on a pending appeal, he could serve more than 2.5 years in prison and be banned from politics. Prosecutors are seeking up to 18 years in prison on the other charges, including that of leading a criminal organization within Istanbul city hall, responsible for hiring people connected to banned Kurdish groups.
Imamoglu had already been a thorn in Erdogan’s side, having led a successful mayoral campaign in 2019 against the candidate backed by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), despite receiving less funding and media attention. Many viewed this victory as reflecting the growing discontent with Erdogan’s rule.
One day before his arrest, Istanbul University revoked Imamoglu’s diploma, a key development because presidential candidates must have at least an undergraduate degree.
Imamoglu is far from the only CHP member facing charges. Since March the government has intensified its efforts to quash the opposition through five waves of crackdowns. Most recently, on 1 June, Turkish authorities detained dozens on corruption charges, including municipal mayors, CHP party members, and city officials. According to the BBC, the first four waves of arrests saw 110 people detained on charges of corruption. More than 800 protesters are also facing criminal trials, the Istanbul prosecutor’s office said in April.
Prosecutors have also cracked down on independent journalists across the country. In the wake of Imamoglu’s arrest, several Turkish and foreign journalists reporting on the protests were detained and later released.
Imamoglu remains in pre-trial detention at Marmara Prison, Europe’s largest high-security jail, notorious for housing political prisoners. His trial is set to begin in mid-July.
It Began in Gezi Park
To many, the current wave of protests recalls the 2013 Gezi Park movement – though there are differences.
The Gezi Park protests began in May 2013, when a small group of environmental activists gathered to oppose the government’s plan to demolish one of Istanbul’s last central green spaces. The small green park was to be replaced with a shopping mall in a replica of Ottoman-era military barracks.
At the time, the ruling AKP, led by then-Prime Minister Erdogan, had been in power for over a decade. The government’s increasingly authoritarian posture – marked by restrictions on press freedom, a crackdown on dissent, aggressive urban redevelopment, and Islamization of public life – had generated growing unease among secular and liberal segments of the population.
Over 3.5 million people are estimated to have participated across nearly every province in Turkey. Taksim Square, adjacent to Gezi Park, became the epicenter. Long associated with labor demonstrations, from the 1977 May Day massacre to more recent clashes, Taksim has served as a contested space for public assembly in Turkey.
Riccardo Gasco, foreign policy program coordinator at the IstanPol Institute, observes that the Gezi Park protest initially had no political subtext. The demonstrations quickly evolved into a broader movement criticizing authoritarianism, media censorship, and urban gentrification, bringing together people from a wide political spectrum.
Today, the protests have been inherently political from the outset, Gasco said. The arrest of Imamoglu was a catalyst for many students to get involved.
Metehan Akman, a project coordinator at the Turkish independent media outlet Medyascope, participated in both protests. He was a university student during Gezi and has been active in the 2025 rallies. He echoed the sentiment that unlike the spontaneous and leaderless Gezi protests, today’s eruption of public anger has seen clear political leadership under the CHP.
“They are at the wheel,” he said of Imamoglu’s political party, which has spearheaded the organization of demonstrations, signature drives, and economic boycotts.
Turkey’s oldest political party, CHP was launched in 1923 by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founding father of the secular, socially progressive Turkish republic. Since the rise of AKP more than 20 years ago, the CHP has positioned itself as the main opposition, often criticizing the AKP’s increasingly illiberal tendencies, Islamic-oriented policies, and erosion of secular principles.
Gen Z to the Fore
In the days following Imamoglu’s arrest, media coverage described students not only as participants but as key organizers of the mass demonstrations and marches. From Middle East Technical University in Ankara to prestigious Bogazici University in Istanbul, students staged sit-ins and walkouts, often facing a heavy police presence and the threat of arrest.
Many issued declarations condemning the government’s actions and explicitly aligning themselves with the CHP’s broader opposition campaign. Their visibility at rallies, coordination through WhatsApp networks, and role in spreading protest information online has made them a driving force in sustaining the regular protests.
For many young Turks, Imamoglu’s arrest is just the latest in a much broader erosion of democratic norms under Erdogan. Gen Z grew up during his two-decade rule and has come of age amid a tightening of state control over media, education, and public dissent.
On 14 April, hundreds of high school students from “project schools” – state-funded institutions known for academic excellence – demonstrated in Istanbul and other cities against what they called politically motivated reassignments affecting thousands of teachers, some of whom were affiliated with the opposition.
The students carried signs and flags with one poster saying, “Until today, our teachers have always thought of us, supported us, and stood behind us. Now it’s our turn; we do not remain silent against injustice.” The protest was peaceful but tense, with police in full riot gear forming a barrier around the students.
When asked about the gathering, a police officer calmly explained, “There is no problem. The students are just giving a statement to the media.” Yet for these young people, this was a protest, not a press conference.
The Ministry of Education dismissed the criticisms that the teacher reassignments were political, saying they were part of a scheduled rotation policy.
“They are taking the qualified teachers that they don’t like, that don’t think like them,” one student said. “They took them from us.”
High school students at the protests linked the purging of their teachers to Imamoglu’s arrest. For them, it was all part of a systematic pattern of silencing dissent and affirming conformity to Erdogan’s party line.
Students in Istanbul take the state’s actions against the opposition on a deeply personal level. Many students told journalists their classrooms have become arenas where loyalty to the ruling party is expected and dissent is punished.
Looking Forward
In conversations with independent media outlets and NGOs in Turkey, what stands out is the hope older generations expressed for the future, contrasting today’s young people as a more determined force that could drive progress.
“Hope is us,” said Kaya, the Marmara University student who addressed the crowd in the early days of the 2025 protests.“The university students, the high school students, we are the hope. We have to be hopeful because we have to rely on ourselves above all else. We have to do it.”
Kaya and many of his peers see political engagement not as a choice but an obligation rooted in Turkey’s history. They often invoke the legacy of Ataturk, the republic’s founding father.
Where Ataturk pursued a secular state with checks on religious influence, Erdogan has embraced a more Islamist-leaning model, marked by greater executive power and restrictions on dissent.
One Galatasaray University student, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of government action against her, drew on the words of Ataturk when considering the future of her country, “There are no hopeless situations, there are hopeless people. I never lost hope.”
Madeleine Long, a recent graduate of the University of Richmond, and Alix Minet, who is pursuing a master’s degree in multilingual information management at the University of Reims, both recently completed editorial internships at Transitions. Please note that Yusuf Emre Kaya, one of the sources mentioned in this article, has been accepted for an internship at Transitions this summer, but at the time of writing was in no way affiliated with Transitions.
