Musk Helps Erdoğan Steal the Presidency (Again)
Hundreds of Thousands Protest the Arrest of Ekrem İmamoğlu, Mayor of Istanbul.
Two years ago, Erdoğan, who has changed the rules twice to keep the presidency against laws of term limits, said he wouldn’t run again. He said that after his party lost the mayorship of Istanbul to this man:
This is Ekrem İmamoğlu, a member of the Kemalist CHP party—Erdoğan is Islamist AKP. Two years ago the CHP party swept a raft of elections in Turkey, including the gem: İmamoğlu became mayor of Istanbul, the position held by Erdoğan before he became president.
The minute this happened, Erdoğan, who has bent the constitutional rules of
Turkey TWICE to remain in power—and whom Elon Musk aided by shutting down Twitter to the earthquake-affected near the Syrian border so news of the damage couldn’t spread to the cities—sees in İmamoğlu the one man who can beat him for the presidency.
He’s right. Erdoğan said two year ago, he wouldn’t run again. Nobody believed him. Now he’s arrested his rival on the weekend that he would have been nominated as the CHP’s candidate for president. And he did it on the kinds of charges that mean that İmamoğlu would be permanently disqualified from seeking the presidency: election corruption and terrorism.
Of course, Erdoğan was jailed in 1996 on similar charges, fronted a proxy (Abdullah Gül) in his first bid for the presidency until he could get the laws changed. Abdullah Gül then gave him all the power. As Turkey has term limits, Erdoğan manipulated election dates to run a third time. Now, he’ll run a 4th time (illegal), but he’ll lose.
He’s going to declare martial law and cancel elections. You can expect this guy to TRY to emulate the crowd brutalization of Iran, but the Turks are much, much different people. They really, really fight—and that’s really, really good.
Meanwhile, we sent a backgrounder this morning. It’s worth a read for the history.
And …