15 million votes in support of Istanbul Mayor Imamoglu. This was the result announced by the opposition after the primaries for the 2028 presidential election from the Republican People's Party of Turkey were held on Sunday. The primaries were planned to be held only among 1 million 700 thousand party members, but 4 days before the primaries, Imamoglu was detained along with 105 key representatives of the Istanbul authorities, and on the day of the primaries, the court decided to arrest the mayor on corruption charges, although it rejected the prosecutor's accusation of financing the terrorist Kurdish Workers' Party.

The 13 million votes were added by ordinary Turks who were angry at the authorities' treatment of the Istanbul favourite. There were queues to vote in all cities across the country, including those considered to be President Erdogan's political strongholds.

On the day of the primaries, the CHP had to print additional ballots several times, as the nomination of the Ataturk party's candidate turned into a referendum, the results of which the authorities did not dare to verify. Video footage of queues and personal signatures of Turkish citizens could be the beginning of the end for Erdogan, so he prefers to ignore the opposition's actions now. The government still looks ‘stronger than ever’. However, the current strength of the opposition is reinforced by daily protests of a hundred thousand people outside Istanbul City Hall - despite the official ban on mass gatherings. According to CHP leader Özgür Özel, the number of protesters in Istanbul alone exceeded one and a half million on the day of Imamoglu's detention. The authorities do not give their estimates of the number of people on the streets.

However, this visible part of the Turkish political drama should be called a rental version, the tie-in of the next episode of which began with a triumphant victory in the 2024 local elections. At that time, Ataturk's party regained the top spot in the election race after 47 years of failure, and President Erdogan's ruling party was in second place for the first time in 23 years. Behind the scenes of this complex game is the director's version, some episodes of which are beginning to leak into the public space.

The oligarchs' uprising

A month before the final attack on Imamoglu, the old Turkish oligarchs made an unexpected move. Since 1971, the Koç, Sabancı, Boyner, Ezcalıbaşi, and Doğan families have been united in TÜSİAD, one of the country's oldest business associations. All of them are Turkey's first dollar billionaires, with capital created in 1930-1970. In February 2025, TÜSİAD leaders Orhan Turan and Omer Arif Aras condemned the events in the country that led to the destruction of the business climate and trust in Turkey.

‘The loss of independence of the courts, the elimination of local self-government by frequent suspensions of mayors and the appointment of external managers from the Ministry of Interior, as well as the failure to implement the Constitutional Court's decision, are destroying the foundations of the republic and the business climate in the country,’ is a brief summary of their speeches, which have driven the government and its propagandists into a frenzy. Erdogan replied that the rich had crossed the line and could not dream of returning to the old days when they decided the fate of the country. Both top managers were detained for this demarche, and the prosecutor's office is demanding a 5-year prison sentence for trying to ‘influence a fair trial’.

Oligarchs helped Erdogan's party come to power in 2002. For the next 10 years, neoliberal policies and the active promotion of Turkish business in markets from Europe to the Arab world and the African continent made the secular business elite fellow travellers with then-Prime Minister Erdogan.

However, the oligarchs were used to the fact that their resources, including the most powerful media, would allow them to keep any charismatic on the hook. Meanwhile, Erdogan slowly neutralised all those to whom he owed power.

In 2009, Aydın Doğan's media holding received record fines in the country's history - more than a billion dollars. In 2013, during the Gezi Park protests, the rest of the business began to cool down. At the end of 2013, a hidden conflict with the preacher Fethullah Gulen and his Hizmet movement came to the surface. The confrontation culminated in a bloody show on the night of 16 July 2016. Then most of the holdings associated with Gulen's religious movement were confiscated.

Erdogan slowly weakened the secular elite and the new Anatolian Tigers one by one, and instead grew his own either among relatives and matchmakers or among those who had been waiting for a long time in the first league, such as Ibrahim Demirören, who took control of Aydin Dogan's most powerful media holding (Kanal D, CNNturk, Hurriyet, etc.) after the failed coup attempt. However, Erdogan's son-in-law Selçuk Bayraktar, who is presented by the pro-government media as a model of engineering and missile technology based on well-known American models, received the most assistance in business.

Semi-disintegration within the opposition

If we talk about the sociological measurements of presidential candidates that have been taking place over the past year, each of them has flaws. It so happens that the CHP has two popular figures: the mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoglu, and the mayor of the capital Ankara, Mansur Yavaş. When sociologists simulate a scenario in which each of them stands alone against Erdogan, the results are striking: both Yavaş and Imamoglu defeat Erdogan, if not in the first round, then certainly in the second round. However, the fact is that Ataturk's party, which is controlled by Imamoglu's people, has a strong nationalist wing focused on Yavaş, and the mayor of Ankara, who did not join the primaries, is irritated when asked about the possibility of running independently in 2028. Models with two opposition participants also exist. In this case, two mayors of megacities divide the protest voters between them in a two-to-one ratio, letting the incumbent president come out on top. However, the events are developing so dynamically that it is extremely difficult to predict for certain the second round with Erdogan, Imamoglu and Yavaş in the first round. The option of both Imamoglu and Yavaş leaving is not so fantastic. And we should not be surprised if Ankara Mayor Yavaş, who is currently third in the ratings, becomes the winner of the second round in two years as a result of the unification of various nationalists and clerical patriots from the current camp of the Turkish president. In the face of the threat of a left-Kurdish alliance, Turkish right-wing liberals are able to unite with the most marginal supporters of jihad.

‍A fierce friend

Mansur Yavaş spoke at a rally in support of Ekrem Imamoglu only the second day after his detention. Of course, the Ankara mayor had a good reason for doing so, just as he was perhaps the only opposition mayor who did not come to Istanbul in October 2024 to support the head of Istanbul's Esenyurt district, Ahmet Özer, who was accused by the authorities of having links to terrorists, suspended and imprisoned. Yavaş used the Istanbul protest scene to send a message to right-wing forces, both within the opposition and Erdogan's inner circle: ‘We see the police of this government handing out candy at the Nowruz celebration in Haqqar (a Kurdish city on the border with Iraq) to those who hang the terrorist rag (the flag of Iraqi Kurdistan), why shouldn't this police do the same to the youth here in Istanbul who came out to defend our Bashkan Ekrem.’
This demonstrative cutting off of the Kurdish street may be a sign of a decision already made: to go to the polls on their own, uniting all right-wing forces around them. The chances of a right-wing candidate without a past of power are great.
In the event of an unsuccessful outcome, he will still become a bronze medallist, and his position will determine who Turkey will live with in the future: Erdogan again or an unpredictable centre-leftist associated with the Kurds.
The choice is obvious.And then, from a long-time oppositionist, Yavaş becomes a vizier to the sultan, replacing a nationalist elder.

This path has already been travelled by the leader of the Nationalist Movement Party, Devlet Bahçeli, who has been fighting with Erdogan since his first steps in politics in the 1990s, and the cases have turned into mutual insults and lawsuits.
However, after the 2016 coup attempt, Bahçeli was the first to lend a shoulder to the president and has since played the role of Recep Tayyip Erdogan's junior partner and older brother.

The reaction to Yavaş' speech from the Turkish Kurds was immediate.Pervin Buldan, a member of the Turkish parliament from the Equality and Democracy of Peoples Party, called Yavaş a fascist who continues the chauvinistic policies of the pre-Erdogan era.

‍The Kurds decide the fate of Turkey

The Kurdish political force has changed its name so often due to constant threats of closure that there is no point in remembering it. Five years ago, it was the Peoples' Democracy Party. It ran in the 2023 elections as the Green Left Party, and last year it renamed itself the Party of Equality and Democracy of Peoples. And these are just a few of the latest brands under which it has run.

Therefore, from now on, we will simply refer to it as the Pro-Kurdish Party.The Kurds reached their electoral peak in 2015, gaining 14% of the vote and convincing many left-wing Turks that they were now a pan-Turkish political force that did not plan to tear the country apart.

Since then, the party has seen a decline in its electoral performance, but the motivation to keep the threshold above 10% has disappeared, as Turkey has recently lowered this threshold - the highest among Council of Europe countries - to 7%.

The honeymoon period between Erdogan and the Kurds ended in 2014 amid fierce fighting between Syrian Kurds and jihadist forces on the Turkish border, which coincided with the unrest in Turkish cities controlled by Kurdish leaders.

Erdogan once came to power with the largest package of proposals for the residents of the southeast of the country. But the resumption of terrorist attacks by the Kurdish Workers' Party has turned the Turkish leader into a standard ruler who has brought back the harsh methods of sultans and generals to restore order in the region.

The current warming and the promise to release the founder of the Kurdish Workers' Party, Abdullah Ocalan, from solitary confinement for life on the island of Imralı to house arrest is a rational transaction: Ocalan will spend his old age among his family, agreeing to disband the armed group; the pro-Kurdish party will get a result in the eyes of its voters; Erdogan will have a reserve of votes in parliament to use to extend his term in office.

However, for the Kurds, the best option at the moment is Ekrem Imamoglu, the result of cooperation with whom they have experienced for six years in Istanbul. Mansur Yavaş, on the other hand, is the worst of the bunch for them, as Erdogan is at least already well known. Even if Imamoglu is acquitted in the corruption case, his chances of running are slim due to the cancellation of his diploma, and higher education is a prerequisite for registration as a candidate by the Central Election Commission.

Three Ds for Ekrem

No, Imamoglu did not fake his diploma, he did not have academic slaves study for him, he was not a virtual student.It's just that young Imamoglu did not enter the Istanbul University whose diploma he holds.He spent his preparatory and first year in Nicosia, at the American University of Northern Cyprus, which was not recognised as an academic institution in Turkey itself and was simply a private institution from the point of view of the Turkish educational system.This admission was really easy, because you didn't have to pass difficult exams to get through the competition of several dozen people for one place.You just had to pay the tuition fees. When you have money, it's easier to enter a university in Cyprus and then transfer to a Turkish university. And this was often done by the descendants of wealthy middle-class families (ordinary millionaires), to which Imamoglu's family belonged. However, Imamoglu did not take any illegal steps either, as the issue of transferring from Cypriot private universities to Turkish state universities was only regulated in Turkey in 1996, and Imamoglu received his diploma in 1994.He transferred ‘horizontally’ - from ‘management in English’ in Cyprus to the same speciality at Istanbul University. But these are details, and the case of the diploma's authenticity can be considered in courts for years.

Another Turkish woman

Dilek Imamoglu is the 50-year-old wife of the arrested mayor. Her star only rose after her husband's arrest. Dilek Imamoglu's speeches at protest rallies looked less pompous and fake than the speeches of the leader of the Republican National Party, Özgür Özel, but bolder than the words of Ankara Mayor Yavaş. Imamoglu's name is now the brand of the upcoming campaign, which is bypassing the Erdogan brand on the Turkish political exchange. Therefore, we should not be surprised if the Turkish opposition chooses the Belarusian scenario with Tikhanovskaya, although this analogy is very lame.

Talks about a female leader who, like the mythical Turkic warrior princess Asana, is capable of leading the country and reviving the Turkic world, resumed after Erdogan's withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention.

After the bright rise of Prime Minister Tansu Çiller in the mid-1990s, the country had at least one more chance to unite the opposition around the iron lady Meral Akşener. In this pursuit of women's rights, the Kurds formally bypass all Turkish parties through quotas and mandatory co-chairmanship of women at every level, following the patterns of the German die Linke, but in fact, decisions in Kurdish society are made by men, and there are always real decision-makers behind the big positions of women in the party: from men in the status of advisors, fathers and brothers to the leader of the Kurdish tribe.

Dilek Imamoglu, like the entire Black Sea coast of Turkey, belongs to a completely different subculture of the country, rooted in the Laz and Hemshin traditions. For example, in the conservative Rize near Sakartvelo, where almost all women wear headscarves, these same women are the largest investors in business. Back in 2013, the country's statistics office reported that 80% of Rize women are wealthier than their husbands and make all their own spending decisions. And the men? They retain the public status of alpha males and sit in teahouses where women are not allowed to enter. Our next heroine, Dilek Imamoglu, is one of these women.

A mother of three, an activist for the rights of people with disabilities, she has an ideal biography that the authorities have nothing to oppose. Ms. Dilek, from a small town on the Black Sea coast near Trabzon, was born one of ten children, which makes her a stark contrast to the old secular elites. Unlike her husband, she entered Istanbul University on her own, studying tourism, and then defended her master's and doctoral theses at other Turkish universities. So far, no one has voiced the option of nominating Dilek-Khanum for the highest office, but no one needs it. Both the government and the opposition understand that the elections will be held earlier than planned in 2028, but the opposition will only open its cards after President Erdogan takes the next step.