Opinion | I am Erdogans Main Challenger in Turkey. I Was Arrested.
Early in the morning on March 19, dozens of armed police officers showed up at my door with a detention order.The scene resembled the capture of a terrorist, not of the elected mayor of Istanbul, Turkey’s largest city.The move — four days before my party, the Republican People’s Party, was to hold a primary for the next presidential race — was dramatic but hardly unexpected.
It followed months of escalating legal harassment of me, culminating in the abrupt revocation of my university diploma 31 years after I had graduated.Authorities seemed to believe this would disqualify me from the race because the constitution requires the president to have a degree in higher education.Realizing he cannot defeat me at the ballot box, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has resorted to other means: having his main political opponent arrested on charges of corruption, bribery, leading a criminal network and aiding the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, even though the charges lack credible evidence.
I was suspended from my elected office over the financial charges.For years, Mr.Erdogan’s regime has gnawed away at democratic checks and balances — silencing the media, replacing elected mayors with bureaucrats, sidelining the legislature, controlling the judiciary and manipulating elections.
The large-scale arrests of protesters and journalists in recent months have sent a chilling message: No one is safe.Votes can be nullified and freedoms can be stripped away in an instant.
Under Mr.Erdogan, the republic has been transformed into a republic of fear.This is more than the slow erosion of democracy.
It is the deliberate dismantling of our republic’s institutional foundations.My detention marked a new phase in Turkey’s slide into authoritarianism and the use of arbitrary power.
A country with a long democratic tradition now faces the serious risk of passing the point of no return.The crackdown extended beyond me.In a sweeping operation built on an indictment that is...