Pallade Veneta - Erdogan turns sights on opposition CHP with his main rival in jail

"When the big fishes are exposed, they won't dare to look their own families in the eye, let alone the nation," the president warned this week, hinting at a fresh legal action targeting the Republican People's Party (CHP).

Last week, Istanbul's popular mayor Ekrem Imamoglu was arrested along with several top aides as well as two other district mayors as part of a fraud and "terror" probe, the move sparking a massive wave of protests across the country.

All three mayors belong to the CHP, which on Sunday elected Imamoglu as its candidate for the 2028 presidential race. A fourth CHP mayor was also quizzed this week over fraud allegations.

Press reports suggest the authorities are now trying to block a CHP congress on April 6 in order to decapitate its leadership a year after the party won a landslide victory in Turkey's local elections.

"The scale of arrests and charges indicates an attempt to systematically weaken the CHP in Istanbul," Seren Selvin Korkmaz, co-director of the IstanPol think tank, wrote on X.

- 'Domesticating' the opposition -

For Yunus Sozen, a political scientist at Le Moyne College in New York, getting rid of Imamoglu was the first step in a broader scheme.

"It looks like the initial plan was to jail Imamoglu, appoint a government trustee to Istanbul municipality, and then appoint another trustee to the CHP, thereby rendering competitive elections meaningless," he told AFP.

"However, at least for the time being, they have not proceeded with the second and third legs of the plan due to the massive protests," he said.

For that, they would "need to rely on coercion against the majority of society," he said.

Sebnem Gumuscu, a political scientist at Middlebury College in Vermont, said the upheaval since March 19 had strengthened the CHP -- for now -- making it "highly unlikely" its leadership would be unseated.

But Erdogan was clearly trying to ensure the CHP was "domesticated" and unable to "fundamentally challenge his regime", she told AFP.

The CHP, which controls Istanbul, the capital Ankara and the western coastal city of Izmir -- Turkey's three largest cities -- made a breakthrough last year, winning 35 of 81 provincial capitals.

That was 11 more than Erdogan's Islamic-rooted AKP which has been in power since 2002.

It was a slap in the face for Erdogan, who lost Istanbul to CHP in 2019, and who is desperate to retake Turkey's economic powerhouse of 16 million people, where he himself was mayor in the 1990s.

In conceding defeat last year, he admitted it was a "turning point" for his party, which since then has tried to weaken the opposition.

As he himself once said: "Whoever wins Istanbul, wins Turkey."

- 'Crushing Turkey's democracy' -

In backing moves to reopen dialogue with the banned Kurdish militant PKK in October, Erdogan was hoping to create divisions between CHP and the pro-Kurdish opposition DEM party, observers said.

Last year, the two parties observed a power-sharing agreement as they did in 2019, ensuring Imamoglu's resounding re-election, despite AKP's considerable firepower.

To protect itself from further attack, CHP "must build alliances with other political parties, civil society organisations and unions," the Cumhuriyet opposition daily said on Friday.

Although Erdogan has also sought to fan the flames of division within CHP itself, the party has for now closed ranks, united in the face of Imamoglu's arrest and other attacks, and bolstered by the mass street protests.

But that could easily change.

"If the protests lose steam, the CHP risks reverting to fragmentation and may not sustain the large-scale mobilisation needed to challenge the ruling bloc," said Korkmaz.

But if Erdogan was successful in his efforts to strangle the CHP, it would be a drastic blow for Turkey's fragile democracy, Sozen said.

"Crushing the CHP means crushing whatever is left of democracy in Turkey," he said.

"More precisely, it means transforming Turkey's elected authoritarian regime into a fully authoritarian one."

B.Cretella--PV