“THE PRESIDENT had a great conversation with Erdogan a couple of days ago,” Donald Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, told an interviewer on March 21st. “There’s just a lot of good, positive news coming out of Turkey.” As he spoke, the biggest protests in over a decade were spreading across the country. Perhaps Mr Witkoff was referring to America’s prospective sale of F-35 jets to Turkey, or to the country’s offer to mediate in Ukraine. But that he said nothing about the arrest on March 19th of Turkey’s top opposition politician, Ekrem Imamoglu, or the ensuing demonstrations, was probably not lost on President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Turkey’s leader is reading the mood in Western capitals and exploiting his position abroad to orchestrate a crackdown at home.

For more than a week, despite bans on public gatherings, student protesters have faced off against police. More than 1,800 people, including at least ten journalists, have been detained. Scores have been injured. Every evening tens of thousands of mostly young people pack the square outside Istanbul’s city hall. Almost every night, they brave tear gas, water cannons and rubber bullets. Mr Imamoglu, the city’s mayor and the Turkish opposition’s de facto leader, was arrested on corruption charges widely considered bogus. The outrage shows no signs of subsiding.

On March 23rd, as Mr Imamoglu was being moved to a maximum-security prison on the city’s outskirts, the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) staged a primary election to confirm him as its candidate in the next presidential elections, scheduled for 2028. It was open to all voters, not just CHP members. The party said 15m Turks took part.

Faced with the biggest challenge to his rule in years, Mr Erdogan has seized on reports of policemen injured in clashes with protesters to accuse the opposition of fomenting violence. “Beware,” he said on March 25th. “Our country will not give in to street terror.” It is a familiar line. Over a decade ago Turkey’s strongman compared a wave of protests, which began with calls to save a popular Istanbul park from developers, to a coup. Scores of demonstrators were prosecuted. Osman Kavala, a businessman and arts patron the government framed as their leader, was sentenced to life in prison in 2022.

Mr Erdogan need not fear pressure from his NATO allies. Turkey is a “good place” and its president a “good leader”, Mr Trump said on March 25th. European leaders, who hope Turkey will join a “coalition of the willing” to supply peacekeeping troops in Ukraine, have been mealy-mouthed. Britain has been silent. European countries’ fear of uncontrolled migration via Turkey dictated policy towards Mr Erdogan in the past, says Senem Aydin-Duzgit of Sabanci University in Istanbul; fear of Russia now plays the same role.

Turkey’s economy took a hit after the arrests, though the government tempered the blow. After three days of chaos, during which the stockmarket index plunged by 16% and the Turkish lira hit a record low against the dollar, the authorities restored a measure of calm. It has come at a big cost. Stockmarket regulators have banned short selling. To avoid a currency crash, the central bank has sold at least $26bn (of $97bn) in foreign-currency reserves and raised its overnight lending rate. Having replenished its coffers over the past couple of years, the bank can defend the lira in the short term even if foreign portfolio investors head for the door, says Ibrahim Turhan, its former deputy head.

But the damage has been done. Since 2023 Turkey’s economic team has cleaned up some of the mess caused by Mr Erdogan’s previous policies, which pursued growth at any cost. Dramatic interest-rate increases restored faith in the lira. Annual inflation, which had approached triple digits, dipped to 39%, letting the central bank begin to cut rates cautiously. The crackdown has wrong-footed the technocrats. “Many foreign investors bought into the shift towards orthodox policies,” says Piotr Matys at InTouch Capital Markets, a consultancy in London and New York. “Their confidence has been seriously shaken.”

Mr Erdogan hopes the CHP can be placated by a court ruling that allows the party to retain control of Turkey’s biggest city. (Had Mr Imamoglu been arrested on terrorist charges, the government would have replaced him with its own surrogate.) On March 26th Istanbul’s city assembly, where the CHP has a majority, elected one of Mr Imamoglu’s associates as acting mayor. The previous day the party’s leader, Ozgur Ozel, announced an end to the protests at the city hall, but not before calling a mass rally over the weekend.

On Istanbul’s streets there is a sense that the genie is out of the bottle. “The more we keep quiet, the more they attack us. Enough is enough,” says Silan, a young woman wearing a surgical mask to protect herself from tear gas and CCTV cameras. Meral, a housewife, joined the protests with her daughter, a university student. “This is not about Imamoglu or the CHP,” she says. “This is because our right to vote and to be elected is being taken away.”

Mr Erdogan’s rule, now in its 23rd year, is in little danger. Turkey’s battered democracy is. On the eve of Mr Imamoglu’s arrest, you could still claim that the government could be held accountable by voters, if not by the subservient courts or media. With Mr Erdogan’s main opponent packed off to prison, that government has taken a possibly irreversible step towards becoming a regime. ■

To stay on top of the biggest European stories, sign up to Café Europa, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter.