Turkish opposition marches to Istanbul

[Gizem]

The largest protest since 2013 is annoying President Recep Tayyip Erdogan

The worst that Kemal Kilicdaroglu has suffered so far, on the 450km (280 mile) protest march he is leading from Ankara to Istanbul, are blisters and broken toenails. In that sense, the 68-year-old leader of Turkey’s biggest opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), is lucky. Other opposition politicians are in prison. Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has jailed more than 50,000 people and sacked more than 110,000 in ever-wider purges following an attempted coup last July. Mr Erdogan and his Islamist AK party have muzzled the country’s media, stacked the schools, courts and army with loyalists and changed the constitution to grant the president untrammelled executive power.

“We had to do this, because we ran out of options,” said Mr Kilicdaroglu, his face sunburnt from the day’s hike. Mr Kilicdaroglu and thousands of fellow marchers had just walked 22km along a highway through 34°C heat, pausing at rest stops to nap and recharge mobile phones. Now several hundred were camped out for the night in a supermarket parking lot in Izmit, an industrial town on Istanbul’s outskirts. Organisers urged the demonstrators to keep their voices down to avoid disturbing residents in the surrounding high-rise blocks, some of whom had draped Turkish flags over their balconies to show support.

Mr Kilicdaroglu launched the “March for Justice” on June 15th. It has grown into Turkey’s largest anti-government protest since 2013. The trigger was the sentencing of a CHP deputy to 25 years in prison for leaking a video to a newspaper that embarrassed the government. (The video seems to show illicit Turkish arms shipments to Syrian rebels in 2014.) The CHP, which mostly represents Turkey’s secular urban classes, had earlier failed to protest strongly against the prosecutions of MPs from a pro-Kurdish party, the HDP. Indeed, a few CHP deputies voted for the government’s move to lift their parliamentary immunity. Some accuse Mr Kilicdaroglu of not opposing Mr Erdogan’s purges early enough.

The marchers hope to energise Turkey’s fractured opposition, reaching beyond the CHP’s traditional base. They have garnered support from some nationalist politicians, a small Islamist party and even the pro-Kurdish HDP. “The march is recognition that the polite game of parliamentary opposition that Kilicdaroglu has played is no longer operative,” says Howard Eissenstat, a Turkey expert at St Lawrence University in New York.

The new recruits are people like Nuran Erman, a housewife who was one of the few female marchers to wear a religious headscarf. Escaping the midday sun in a thicket of trees beside the motorway, munching on watermelon and apricots to cool off, Mrs Erman rattled off a long list of grievances, including the jailing of more than 100 journalists and the destruction of forests in a construction boom led by companies close to the government. “I cried for two days after the referendum” in April that approved Mr Erdogan’s enhanced powers, she said.

The real test is expected to come when the marchers enter Istanbul. Organisers say the march will swell as locals join in. On the road, their numbers have ranged from about 5,000 up to 20,000, and a cordon of police has chased off cars that occasionally slow to hurl insults or flash Mr Erdogan’s four-fingered salute. But in Istanbul they may encounter resistance from Mr Erdogan’s supporters. The president has called them “wilful partners in treason against the nation”.

https://www.economist.com/news/europ...keys-embattled

[Halgurd]

He's a weak leader. Him and his party stood silent while the government was purging HDP MPs and officials, and now it is their turn.