Mass protests in Ankara ahead of court ruling that could unseat Turkey’s opposition leader

Tens of thousands of people took to the streets of Ankara on Sunday to protest a court case that could remove the head of Turkey’s main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), in a ruling expected on Monday.

Live footage showed demonstrators waving Turkish flags and party banners while chanting for President Tayyip Erdogan’s resignation.

The case centres on allegations of procedural irregularities in the CHP’s 2023 congress. A decision to invalidate the congress could unseat party leader Ozgur Ozel, potentially reshaping the opposition, unsettling financial markets and affecting the political timeline ahead of the next general election scheduled for 2028. The court also has the option to postpone its ruling.

Addressing the rally, Ozel accused the government of eroding democratic norms and suppressing dissent in an effort to cling to power, particularly after the opposition’s successes in recent local elections. He also called for an early 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,” Ozel 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 probe into alleged corruption and terrorism links, among them President Tayyip Erdogan’s main political rival – Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu.

The arrest of Imamoglu in March sparked the country’s largest protests in a decade where hundreds of thousands took to the streets, prompting a brief but sharp selloff in the lira and other Turkish assets.

In a letter sent from prison and read aloud at the rally in Ankara, Imamoglu wrote that the government is attempting to pre-determine 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,” Imamoglu wrote.

The crowd applauded and chanted ”President Imamoglu” after the letter read aloud.

With inputs from agencies