President Recep Tayyip Erdogan entered this year facing a knot of political problems with little precedent in his two decades at the summit of power in Turkey. Voters were angry about persistently high inflation. His political party’s popularity had sunk. And his opponents had coalesced around the mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoglu, who made it clear that he was gunning for the presidency. Then on Wednesday, just four days before the mayor was set to be designated as the political opposition’s presidential candidate, dozens of policemen arrested him at his home on accusations of corruption and terrorism. Mr. Erdogan’s foes consider the arrest a ploy to abort Mr. Imamoglu’s presidential campaign before it even begins. At stake is not only who will be Turkey’s next president, analysts, opposition leaders, and foreign officials say, but to what extent Turkey, one of the world’s 20 largest economies and a U.S. ally in NATO, can still be considered a democracy.
Source link
