The New Yorker:

After purging the judiciary, cracking down on the media, and jailing political opponents, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan faces protests on a scale not seen in a decade.

By Isaac Chotiner

Last week, Turkish authorities arrested Ekrem Imamoğlu, the mayor of Istanbul and the expected leading challenger to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in the country’s next Presidential election, scheduled for 2028. Imamoğlu, who is a member of the Republican People’s Party (C.H.P.), has been accused of corruption and supporting terrorism; he’s denied the charges and called them politically motivated. In response to Imamoğlu’s detention, nationwide protests have broken out at a scale not seen in at least a decade. Erdoğan has been running Turkey since 2003, and he has maintained his hold on power, in part, by cracking down on political opponents and on the media. Some of those opponents come from Turkey’s long-persecuted Kurdish minority; last month, Abdullah Öcalan, the incarcerated leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (P.K.K.), called for a ceasefire in the P.K.K.’s long-running insurgency against the Turkish government, as part of a process that could potentially lead to the group disarming, and to him being freed from prison.

I recently spoke by phone with Jenny White, professor emerita at the Stockholm University Institute for Turkish Studies and an expert on modern Turkey. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why Erdoğan struck at his opponent now, the way his rule has changed over the past two-plus decades, and the similarities and differences between his authoritarian style and that of Donald Trump.

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