IT WAS the biggest opposition rally in years. Hundreds of thousands of people came out in Istanbul on March 29th to demand the release of Turkey’s best-known recent political prisoner, Ekrem Imamoglu. The country’s news media rose to the challenge: the state broadcaster offered tips for prospective home owners. One channel showed traffic police handing out sweets to drivers. Another featured chefs preparing snacks for the Eid al-Fitr holiday.

The news blackout was the latest example of the stranglehold that Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has over the country’s media. But it also revealed the extent to which Turkey’s leader continues to fear the fallout from his rival’s arrest.

The good news for Mr Erdogan is that the shock waves that rocked Turkish markets on March 19th, when police detained Mr Imamoglu, the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) nominee for president, outside his home, have since faded. Street protests have given way to more orderly CHP rallies. And Mr Erdogan’s strategy of using the prospect of peace talks with Kurdish insurgents to keep Kurdish politicians from closing ranks with the CHP seems to have paid off.

Mr Imamoglu will almost certainly not come out of prison ahead of the presidential elections, set for 2028 but expected to take place earlier. As Mr Erdogan knows from his own experience, a short spell behind bars would turn Mr Imamoglu into an unstoppable force. Turkey’s leader will make sure his is a long one. But the blowback from the arrest has been much bigger than Mr Erdogan and his Justice and Development (AK) party expected. An opposition boycott of companies considered to be part of Mr Erdogan’s patronage network, as well as those that advertise with the pro-government media, has caught Turkey’s leader off guard.

Ozgur Ozel, the CHP’s leader, has accused Mr Erdogan of presiding over a “junta” and challenged him and AK to call an early election. The response has been more repression; 11 people have been detained in connection with the consumer boycott. On April 8th Mr Erdogan’s lawyers filed a criminal complaint against Mr Ozel for “insulting the president”.

That may be a hint of worse to come. With the economy still in the doldrums (despite some signs of improvement), Mr Erdogan and his camp may have concluded their only hope is to bulldoze the CHP into submission. That may mean more arrests and attempts to replace the CHP’s leaders with more pliable ones. “They might just try to repress their way out of this,” says Selim Koru, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. “At the end of the day, they’re not willing to tolerate an opposition that’s actually competitive.” ■

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