Students protest towards Erdogan in Istanbul | EUROtoday

On Monday night you’ll be able to watch a brand new scholar motion on the Galata Bridge in Istanbul. You can see how the scholars check and reject protest kinds. How you resolve whether or not you ignore police directions and the way a lot danger you must take.

It’s 8 p.m. At the identical time, the lots collect once more in entrance of the city corridor of Istanbul. But the scholars on the Galata Bridge do not need to go to the city corridor. They need to occupy the bridge and paralyze site visitors. They need as many Istanbulers as attainable to comprehend that these usually are not extraordinary instances when life merely continues.

There are 1000’s of scholars from all universities within the metropolis. You now not solely need to name the Republican People’s Party (CHP) of the imprisoned and suspended mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu. They converse of the combat towards the dictatorship, of the autumn of the president. “I don’t know anyone else,” says a scholar of engineering. He was born in 2004. In 2003 Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was elected Prime Minister.

At 5 p.m. they met within the central district of Beşiktaş and introduced the after -work site visitors to a whole standstill for hours. Her motto: “The youth don’t fit into the Saraçhan.” What is supposed is the place in entrance of the city corridor the place the CHP has been holding its rallies from tens of 1000’s of individuals since Wednesday. “We don’t trust a bourgeois politician,” says a scholar with a high quality mud masks. “We want to create our own student movement. We believe in the power of the street.”

The first milestone is a boycott of all instructional establishments. The scholar is a type of who’ve determined to fill the gala bridge. First they sit, then they dance. “Attention, be careful, here the police speak,” it sounds over the bridge. “Please continue to Saraçhane. We want to open the bridge to traffic.”

The scholar is annoyed by his fellow college students. “We founded committees, but we are not able to communicate effectively. The police are in our group chats.” In the tip, the bridge is cleared. First the police ship brokers. Then she threatens to encirclement. The exhausting core is completed with uncooked violence, with pepper spray and batons.

Dealing with the police is a key query. “Police officers, sells Simit, lives honorably”, the scholars name. For them, the safety forces are henchmen of an authoritarian regime. At the identical time, CHP boss Özgür Özel speaks of the city corridor of “our brothers by the police who are given illegal instructions”. He distances himself from “unjustified attacks against our police”, however not from police violence.

Özel desires to forestall the protests from being discredited as violent. President Erdoğan threatened him in a speech within the night: “The sole responsibility for the injured police officers.. The broken shop windows. Erdoğan plays on the well -known keyboard of the division of society. He claims that the demonstrators turned mosques into drinking halls and desecrated old graves.

Like the scholars, Özel speaks on Monday night that the protests ought to now “change form”. He knows that he has to spark a new dynamic so that the demonstrations do not rub out of exhaustion. Among other things, he calls for a buyer boycott against government companies: a coffee house chain, a petrol station group, a travel book platform, a book trade company. The pressure on Erdoğan in its own warehouse is to be increased.

It is necessary, says Özel, to not take the workers of the businesses into co -liability. “The cameraman of the federal government -friendly broadcaster solely desires to earn his bread.” The party sets up a website on which the companies are listed. One should not fall on other lists that are distributed by government -related entrepreneurs to eliminate their competitors, warns Özel. With the buyer strike, the CHP also wants to build pressure on the television channels close to the government. He is specifically directed against their sister company. This seems to have a certain effect on Tuesday. Suddenly these broadcasters also report on Özel’s speech.

The call to civil disobedience is intended to enable large parts of society to set an example. There is a lot of sympathy for the students in the secular Turkish middle class, which has suffered significant status and wealth. They applaud them and honk in the traffic jam. Professors encourage their students to take to the streets. “You canceled our programs and postponed our closing exams,” reports a engineering student. “You informed us that we must defend the nation now.”

The keeping of the wider society beyond the classic CHP clientele will depend on whether Erdoğan gets on the defensive and the protests cannot just sit out. From the government -related entrepreneurs who fear losses. From politicians of the government party who may go too far. Of the children of the police officers and wives of the judges. Neither the judiciary nor the parliament are nor are able to limit the president’s power because he has filled all institutions with loyalists in recent years.

The protests have already achieved a lot, says Özel. They would have been frightened by a state -appointed forced administrator to replace the central government from being replaced by a state -appointed forced administrator. “You prevented that,” calls Özel of the crowd. For the time being, Istanbul remains in the hands of the CHP. She wants to appoint a representative for the suspended İmamoğlu on Wednesday.

What this means can be read on every street corner. The buses, for example, in which the hundreds of the police from distant parts of the country are distributed in the city, are rented by tourism companies because the Ministry of the Interior has no access to the urban buses.

While the hardly any organized students express vague overthrow plans, Özel gives concrete claims: the release İmamoğlus during his court trial and the live broadcast of the process on television. On Tuesday he visits İmamoğlu in the Silivri prison. The suspended mayor is there in a prominent society. In Silivri, the political prisoners of the Gezi protests from 2013 sit, such as the cultural patron Osman Kavala and the lawyer Can Atalay.

Özel calls for unity. Nationalists, conservative, social democrats, Alevis, Sunnis, Kurds should be together. As a one -off element, he conjures up the social order of secularism, which was determined a hundred years ago.

But cracks appear on the street. Some participants show the ultra-nationalist wolf greeting and hold up posters on which the PKK boss Abdullah Öcalan is referred to as a “bastard”. Many Kurds should find it difficult to run under such posters. The government is trying to deepen the cracks. The hands are bound by the Kurdish party because it does not want to endanger the parallel negotiating process about the disarmament of the PKK.

Meanwhile, President Erdoğan is assured that the detention of his strongest political opponent doesn’t create a headwind. “The heated debates of the previous few weeks have proven that European safety will likely be unimaginable with out Turkey,” says the President on Monday evening. He thinks the relationships with the United States in a “new momentum”. Özel’s deputy İlhan Uzgel says: “You contemplate the worldwide atmosphere to be favorable for a smear of the opposition.”

Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan is to be welcomed by his counterpart Marco Rubio in Washington on Tuesday. In Ankara it is said that the meeting is to prepare for a possible Erdoğan visit. Donald Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden never received Erdoğan in the White House. According to Turkish information, the sale of F-35 fighter planes that America Erdoğan has previously refused to have bought the S-400 rocket defense system from Russia in 2019 has also refused.

Regardless of the arrest of İmamoğlus, Trump’s particular envoy Steve Witkoff mentioned in an interview on Friday with a view to a telephone name between Trump and Erdoğan: “Many good, constructive information comes from Turkey.” And the diplomatic illustration of the United States in Ankara has just one message for the Turkish inhabitants on platform X lately: “If you attempt to illegally (within the USA), you can be thrown out and by no means come again.