‘This process has turned into a form of torture’: inside the trial of Erdoğan’s challenger | Turkey

There’s a Turkish saying, “Silivri soğuktur”: Silivri is cold. You’ll hear it from journalists, politicians and activists after they say something critical of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government. The kind of comments that could send them to the notorious prison complex in Silivri, where it would take months before they saw a judge.

For decades, Silivri was considered a “sayfiye yeri”, a place for cottages, country and summer houses. All around the complex are small family-run farms and villas with private pools, protected by watchdogs. Construction of the Marmara Prison complex began in 2005 and lasted three years. It contains eight closed correctional institutions and an open prison where the court is located. It is Europe’s largest prison complex.

Ekrem İmamoğlu, the former mayor of Istanbul, is now Silivri’s most famous resident. He was detained on 19 March 2025, went on trial on 9 March 2026, and the case is expected to continue until early next year; no one I spoke to believes he will be acquitted.

İmamoğlu is Erdoğan’s greatest potential rival. In 2024, he won the Istanbul local elections handily, with just over 51%. On 18 March 2025, three weeks after İmamoğlu announced his candidacy for the 2028 presidential elections, Istanbul University annulled his college diploma, making him ineligible to run for political office in the country. The following morning, hundreds of police officers surrounded the mayoral residence. He has been accused of 142 offences, including leading a criminal organisation, accepting bribes, unlawfully obtaining personal data, aiding the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ party, racketeering, interfering with public tenders and numerous other financial crimes that could lead to 2,430 years behind bars. In total, 104 other city officials were arrested. Yılmaz Tunç, Turkey’s justice minister at the time, denied that the government was putting pressure on the courts to prosecute İmamoğlu. Akın Gürlek, the prosecutor who indicted İmamoğlu, has since replaced Tunç as the new justice minister.

İmamoğlu’s true crime it seemed was to have ended Erdoğan’s 25-year hold on Istanbul, which began when he was elected its mayor in 1994. Since then, Istanbul had seen only mayors from his AKP party and its forebears, the Welfare and Virtue parties. İmamoğlu’s victory, in 2019, marked a departure, handing the city over to the CHP, the main opposition party. He is a former football player who was the popular district mayor of Istanbul’s Beylikdüzü municipality, where he built his brand as a hardworking progressive. His charisma allowed him to talk to pious and secular voters alike. Many Istanbulites shorten his name to “İmam”. His initiatives to combat child malnutrition and improve public transportation and public services solidified his social democratic credentials. İmamoğlu’s triumph led to street parties that continued until the next morning.

İmamoğlu’s trial began on 9 March this year. More than 400 defendants are being tried in the case; 68 of them are currently detained. After reviewing the 3,739-page indictment, submitted by Istanbul’s lead prosecutor on 11 November 2025, the court said it aimed to complete the case in under 4,600 days – roughly 12 and a half years – though they now appear to be speeding through it. Furkan Karabay, a journalist who covers the case and recently published a memoir about the 201 days he spent in Silivri prison for his reporting, told me he expected İmamoğlu to testify in mid-summer. The court case’s length will probably prevent İmamoğlu from running for office in the 2028 elections.

On the first day of the trial, several opposition lawmakers who are professional lawyers showed up in the courtroom to show support alongside activists and members of the press. By the time I visited on 13 April, the courtroom seemed deserted. Silivri is 83km (52 miles) away from my apartment in central Istanbul. It takes two hours to make it to the courthouse.

Gendarmerie officers, who operate in smaller towns, had refused entry to reporters not holding “turquoise press cards” issued by Erdoğan’s directorate of communications. But they allowed me access after perusing the press card that Artforum magazine annually dispatches to art critics from its offices in Manhattan. The young officer in the court was even more generous, handing me a badge that granted me access not only to the press room but also to the courtroom. I could sit there next to family members of İmamoğlu and other jailed defendants charged with membership in the “Ekrem İmamoğlu criminal organisation”.

The atmosphere was calm, so I headed to the press room in the morning. Bored gendarmerie officers there joked about the Galatasaray football match the previous night. Four sleepy court reporters (proceedings had run until 10pm the previous evening) from three wire agencies and one national newspaper had brought along meal boxes, and an electric coffee pot that brewed their first Turkish coffees of the day.

We watched as lawyers and family members entered the courtroom from an 85in wall screen. Reporters chatted about the dangers of Ozempic, a man who claimed to have lost 40kg by “squeezing lemon into his Turkish coffee”, and the healthy habit of jumping rope. “Why do we come here every day when our papers don’t even use our reports?” complained one, yawning.

İmamoğlu’s lawyers entered the courtroom on the first floor. Then about a dozen defendants took their seats after climbing steps that led directly from the basement floor through a courtroom trapdoor. Relatives sitting in the stalls jumped up in excitement, waving and blowing kisses at their loved ones. The judge asked if anyone wanted to make a statement. İmamoğlu, sitting in the fifth row, stood up, holding a microphone. It was 10.55am. The chatty reporters sank into silence.

“This process has turned into a form of torture,” İmamoğlu said in his opening statement. People who worked for him in the Istanbul municipality have been “forgotten inside the prison like stones cast into a well”. He called the case “unbelievable” and “shameful”, and voiced his concerns about the families of the detained, whom he described as “sıfır maaşlı”, zero-income people. Although he will be the last defendant to take the stand, he is allowed to make statements in court daily. When detained last year, İmamoğlu was offered his choice of lawyers. A member of his defence team, Mehmet Pehlivan, was then detained in June 2025, charged with money laundering.

The gendarmerie officers kept a close eye on those seated in court, checking that no one was using their smartphone to film İmamoğlu. It’s illegal to record proceedings in Turkey’s courthouses; the judges have prosecuted those who share images or sound clips from proceedings in the past. That means the only people who could see the next presidential candidate of Turkey’s main opposition party, aside from his jailers, were those sitting in the court and the press room.

The Turkish government has tried to stop İmamoğlu’s rise to national prominence since his first mayoral win in 2014 in the municipality of Beylikdüzü. İmamoğlu’s success led to his candidacy for Istanbul mayor in 2019, which he won. First, Turkey’s supreme election council annulled the results of the election and insisted on a rerun. İmamoğlu increased his vote by about 530,000. Then, in 2022, a court convicted him to 31 months in prison for insulting officials from the supreme election council. (İmamoğlu appealed aganst the ruling.)

After İmamoğlu won the March 2024 mayoral elections in Istanbul with a comfortable margin of 10% over his opponent from the ruling party, the government’s panic grew. İmamoğlu had become a household name in national politics in only a few years. And that election indicated widespread dissatisfaction with Erdoğan’s party. İmamoğlu’s win against Erdoğan’s mayoral candidate of choice allowed Istanbulites like me to imagine a country not run by the AKP. “Whoever wins Istanbul, wins Turkey,” Erdoğan used to say.

Ali Yaycıoğlu, an associate professor of Ottoman and Turkish history at Stanford University who has worked as İmamoğlu’s ghostwriter, landed in Istanbul on 18 March and was preparing to meet the mayor the next day. After he went to bed, he got a call from a journalist friend, telling him about the arrests, suggesting he should leave the country. “At that moment, we didn’t know what was happening; nothing was clear,” he told me. Yaycıoğlu called a friend in Berlin to say he was on his way to Germany and headed to the airport. İmamoğlu was arrested the next day.

Yaycıoğlu first met İmamoğlu in 2020, when İmamoğlu called him to say he admired his newspaper columns on Turkish history. “He wanted to take private lessons on history, leftwing ideas and world affairs from me – he said he needed to improve himself.” They had 20 lessons, and the mayor kept a special notebook for them. “His mind was very open, very receptive. The things he learned stayed with him.”

Over time, the teacher-student relationship turned into a friendship, and Yaycıoğlu became part of İmamoğlu’s inner circle. This was when the speechwriting job started. He was with İmamoğlu on the night of the March 2024 election and wrote his victory speech. The room was crowded and there was no table, so they sat and wrote it on the floor. When Yaycıoğlu returned to Istanbul last March, it was to draft İmamoğlu’s speech for his presidential candidacy. “But then there was talk of revoking his diploma. I knew something was going to happen.”

Yaycıoğlu, who has not returned to Turkey since, started corresponding with İmamoğlu in prison. During this period, he wrote İmamoğlu’s op-eds for media outlets including the Financial Times. When I spoke to him, he was working on İmamoğlu’s defence from the campus of Harvard University, as an adviser to his legal team. “I’m establishing the historical framework of the defence; it will be a very long text,” he said. He wouldn’t elaborate, except to say that it would be “a political defence”.

In September 2025, six months after his detention in the case for which he is currently being tried, İmamoğlu was convicted in the earlier case to two years and seven months in jail: the verdict resulted in what the Turkish law refers to as “siyaset yasağı”, a ban on all future political activities. It may seem unrealistic, in the wake of that decision, to think İmamoğlu can still run for president in 2028, but he has appealed against the verdict, and Yargıtay (the supreme court) can still overturn it in the future.

İmamoğlu had been a savvy social-media operator from the start of his career. This has allowed him to remain part of the daily lives of Istanbulites despite his physical disappearance from the public sphere. After his arrest, images of İmamoğlu – on billboards placed on highways and in subway stations, and on posters put up on the sides of construction sites and buildings – remained in the city for a few weeks. But after massive protests against İmamoğlu’s arrest, the interior ministry ordered the city’s police department to remove posters and banners belonging to İmamoğlu and other detained opposition mayors. This attempt to disappear the mayor from the public sphere extended to social media, too. Between May 2025 and March 2026, İmamoğlu’s X account was “withheld” five times, forcing his team to find alternative handles.

In June 2025, CHP announced it would employ artificial intelligence and holograms in its presidential campaign for İmamoğlu. An AI-generated video message, released on YouTube in September 2025, shows İmamoğlu with an image of Atatürk, saying: “Neither pressures, nor obstacles, nor dark schemes will stop this march. Because we are right, because we are the people, because we are the republic!” In March, İmamoğlu told the court he hoped Turkey would have a female president; the statement set off rumours that his wife, Dilek İmamoğlu, may run in his place in the 2028 elections.

In court, İmamoğlu looked well. Dressed in a dark suit and a tie, he was surrounded by young gendarmerie officers looking at their phones.

The previous week, he said, a prosecutor had told him: “If you don’t know your place, we’ll teach it to you.” He asked, rhetorically, who was behind this threat, and reminded the court that “the people are behind me”. There was applause from the stalls.

The atmosphere in the courtroom has often been tense. On two occasions, the judge ordered the courtroom cleared and adjourned the case. On 9 March, when İmamoğlu wanted to greet those in the courtroom at the start of the hearing, the presiding judge switched off his microphone and instructed the gendarmerie to remove him from the courtroom. On 12 March, the judge sought to change the journalists’ seating arrangement in court after scolding them for asking İmamoğlu questions during a hearing. After reporters resisted, the judge ended the hearing early. In another hearing, İmamoğlu objected to being carried from his cell to the courtroom “like a ping pong ball”.

Today, the antagonism between the defendants and the system judging them took the shape of civilised disagreement.

İmamoğlu’s candidacy to be Turkey’s next president has inevitably turned him into the central figure in the hearings. But his private secretary, his security manager and his chief of staff were all arrested alongside him last year, as were the deputy secretary general of Istanbul municipality and the head of the city’s water company. Every day, one defendant presents their defences in court, answers questions from prosecutors and hopes to convince the judge to release them. Each defendant present in court is allowed to react to statements made in the proceedings.

After İmamoğlu made his statement and sat down, his campaign manager, Necati Özkan, took to the stand. Özkan is one of the key figures of the case. He is charged with “membership in an organisation established for the purpose of committing crimes”, which carries a potential sentence of up to six years in prison. He is also named in the investigation in connection with “facilitating bribery” and “illegally recording, providing, or obtaining personal data”. A self-described Obama fan (he has published a book called Obama’s Leadership Secrets), Özkan has often compared the CHP’s journey with that of famous heroes. In his 2019 book Kahramanın Yolculuğu: Yeni nesil siyasetin zaferi (The Hero’s Journey: The Triumph of New Generation Politics), he explains how he and İmamoğlu built their campaign inspired by figures such as Frodo Baggins from The Lord of the Rings and Neo from The Matrix.

Dressed in a suit, like İmamoğlu, Özkan handed a 243-page dossier to the judge containing details of the financial transactions of his advertisement business. Özkan argued that he was a professional who devoted his life to his work: his financial transactions were normal in this line of work. He asked to play a clip from the successful campaign video he shot for İmamoğlu; when the judge refused, he described its script in detail. The ad showed Istanbul’s natural and architectural beauties, from the Bosphorus and the Hagia Sophia to the curvaceous Camondo steps, built by the Ottoman-Venetian Jewish banker Abraham Salomon Camondo in 1880, while a singer on the soundtrack sings: “This love is yours, two shores, seven hills / this strait, this bay, this city is yours, / the past is yours, the future is yours / a new life, a brand new beginning is yours / the decision is yours / Istanbul is yours.” The ad had reminded voters they weren’t passive bystanders and consumers, and that they could actively help run the city through democratic means. İmamoğlu appears at the end and smiles silently. The campaign motto, “Her şey çok güzel olacak” (everything will be fine) now sounded sad.

Özkan was methodical in his defence, addressing each claim in detail, trying to convince the judge of his innocence. He did not raise his voice or show signs of anger. Only once did he express a sense of deep wariness. “They claim two times two equals purple,” he said. “If they said two times two equalled five, I could have tried to correct it, but how can I correct this?” The court recessed.

İmamoğlu’s case isn’t exceptional: Turkish prosecutors have opened investigations against opposition-held municipalities around the country. Every week, there is news of fresh arrests of CHP mayors at the district and city levels. When they are arrested, the positions are often filled by their deputies. Nuri Aslan, İmamoğlu’s former deputy, now runs Istanbul. In the city’s Esenyurt and Şişli districts, the government has appointed kayyıms (trustees) to replace detained CHP mayors. Ezgi Başaran, a scholar at Oxford University, calculated that 30 municipalities in Turkey, representing 28 million people, are run by politicians not elected by their citizens because of these arrests. Between the local elections in March 2024 and May 2026, 76 mayors from different parties, including 17 from CHP, joined the AKP, allegedly to escape the fate of İmamoğlu. Court cases against the CHP have also targeted the party’s leadership. On 21 May, the Turkish court of appeals annulled the CHP’s November 2023 results in order to restore a politician who was hostile to İmamoğlu. On 24 May, riot police stormed the CHP’s headquarters in Ankara, using teargas to break into the building to evict its ousted leadership.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the torrent of cases against CHP politicians, attention is fading. In 2025, 65% of Turks said they believed İmamoğlu’s arrest was “unfair”, but the number dropped to less than 50% this year. The Turkish lira, which collapsed after İmamoğlu’s arrest and required the Turkish central bank to spend $50bn to support it, has somewhat stabilised. Maybe that’s why, although there is still widespread dissatisfaction with the government, it appears muted. Fatigue seems to have set in among opposition supporters.

İmamoğlu’s rise and fall resemble that of Erdoğan, who was himself elected Istanbul’s mayor in 1994 and placed in a cell just five years later as he was becoming increasingly popular. He was charged with “discriminating against people based on religion and race, and inciting kinship and enmity among them” for reciting a poem. The four months Erdoğan spent in Pınarhisar prison, not far from Silivri, boosted his popularity even further. Supporters queued up outside the prison to show their support. Once released in July 1999, Erdoğan was welcomed as a prospective national leader, and became prime minister less than four years later. But İmamoğlu has already spent more than a year in pre-trial detention. He is unlikely to walk out of Silivri as long as Erdoğan is in power.

After the court recessed, I had lunch at the courthouse cafeteria, where lawyers, journalists and families of the imprisoned congregated. I bought a muffin whose packaging announced it was homemade by the Marmara prisoners themselves. I asked a server, wearing a white uniform like all others, whether he was a convict. He was, he told me, as were all the cooks and cleaners.

Outside the prison, the sun was beaming; the fields shone in their vivid colours; huge windmills nearby turned with great force as I headed home, thinking of İmamoğlu’s parting words before the court recessed. “Good things are happening around us,” said the former mayor, addressing the journalists in court. He was referring to Viktor Orbán’s ouster after 16 years in power as Hungary’s prime minister the previous day. “Long live democracy, long live justice, long live the republic,” he shouted before disappearing through the courtroom’s trap door.

This piece first appeared in the Dial with the headline The Hologram Candidate