Turkey’s President Recep Erdogan is being denounced worldwide for arresting his chief rival in the upcoming presidential election:
Turkish police have arrested Istanbul’s mayor, Ekrem Imamoglu, in a raid on his home just days before his opposition party was expected to nominate him as its candidate for the next presidential election.
Did they search his wife’s underwear drawer?
Police also arrested one of his senior aides….
Check.
Hours after he was detained, Imamoglu, widely seen as the main threat to Erdogan for the presidency, shared a hand-written message on his X account saying that the Turkish people would give the necessary response to “lies, plots and traps” against him.
Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the mayor’s CHP party, described the arrests as “a coup attempt against our next president”.
***
Dr Dilek Kaya Imamoglu, the mayor’s wife, called his arrest “a targeted political operation aimed at eliminating Turkey’s future president”, adding: “This is a direct blow to the nation, and we will fight.”
Does this sound familiar, or what?
The arrest of Imamoglu may now prevent him from standing in elections. He had already been barred from running in the 2023 election because of a conviction for defamation after calling election officials “idiots”, but had appealed the conviction and sentence of two years in prison.
I assume that the charges against Imamoglu, which loosely are claimed to relate to “terrorism”–analogous, I suppose, to “insurrection”–have zero validity. But they can’t possibly be weaker than the criminal prosecutions that were brought against Donald Trump in New York and Georgia. Both were absurdities with no legal basis. And the charges against Trump were brought for the same reason–to disable the incumbent president’s chief opponent.
And yet, while reporters and politicians around the world are horrified at Erdogan’s attempted coup, they generally cheered on the Democrats’ lawfare against Donald Trump. There has still been no accounting for what was likely the worst abuse of the legal system in American history.
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