Paid Subscriber Preview: Greasing the Skids on Turkey's Slide Towards the Abyss

Bleeding Edge just hit 1,000+ subscribers this week, which means yet another fee hike for Ghost.io's hosting. I love this platform, but it is not free. In the interest of giving unpaid subscribers a taste of the reporting I run behind the paywall, I'm including the first couple paragraphs of a dispatch I wrote upon returning from Istanbul this week. It's both first-hand perspective and a deeper dive into the context behind the recent tumult in Turkish society. If you're interested in supporting my work further, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to Bleeding Edge and allowing me the freedom to keep doing this sort of independent reporting.

History doesn't repeat itself, but it sure does echo, in the same way the banging of pots, car horns and whistles rebounded off the dense apartment blocks that line Istanbul's endlessly hilly streets. Turkey is plunging deeper into authoritarianism following the arrest on March 19 of Istanbul Mayor Ekram İmamoğlu on corruption and (since dropped) terrorism charges and an intense police crackdown on nationwide protests and the media. İmamoğlu is the main electoral challenger to Prime Minister/President/Dictator/Reis Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's ironclad grim on power, which is well into its third decade. To give you a sense of how rapidly this movement has grown, somewhere between several hundred thousand to a million-plus demonstrators turned out on March 29 to an anti-government rally at Maltepe, with plans to repeat the phenomenon every weekend in a different city. Aside from the

This isn't the first time Erdoğan has tried to knock İmamoğlu out of the ring: two years ago, the Republican People's Party (CHP in Turkish) politician received a suspended prison sentence for insulting an election board that attempted to overturn his 2019 mayoral election in the city of 20 million, which in the 1990s served as Erdoğan's own springboard to power in Ankara. Using the courts to kill off political opposition is an old tactic - Selahattin Demirtaş, a highly skilled politician from a leftist, pro-Kurdish party who has been imprisoned for almost a decade on an absolutely Kafka-esque 42 year sentence after his party gained enough support to threaten the stranglehold of Erdoğan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) on Turkey's parliament.

Want to read more? The full article is here, behind the paywall.