La giovane “speranza di milioni” della Turchia tenuta in prigione mentre Erdoğan si abbatte sulle proteste | Tacchino

This will be the USA in a few weeks. Good luck, America.

**Popular student demonstrator Berkay Gezgin, 21, snatched off street by police outside office of detained Istanbul mayor**

When 21-year-old Berkay Gezgin left the interior of Istanbul city hall, a squad of police was waiting for him outside. Protests that flooded the streets outside the headquarters of his political hero, [detained mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/23/istanbul-mayor-ekrem-imamoglu-arrested-pre-trial-detention), had begun trickling away by midnight, but hundreds of riot police remained clustered around the municipality building.

Gezgin became the face of youth support for İmamoğlu when he met him on the campaign trail during his first run for mayor in 2019, coining the slogan “Everything will be fine”, which the Istanbul mayor later used in his campaign.

As Gegzin left city hall and looked for his parked motorcycle, the young student was snatched by waiting security forces and bundled into a police car.

His lawyer, Cemil Çiçek, believes the police targeted him for arrest: “They knew who they were arresting and that he has a lot of youth support. We think he was jailed to send a message to people not to protest, not to go into the street, [to say]: if this guy can be jailed, so can you. Two hundred other people were detained on the same day, so maybe now parents will warn their kids against protesting.”

The baby-faced student became one of almost 2,000 people detained in just one week as the Turkish authorities clamped down hard on the [largest anti-government protests](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/24/journalists-among-more-than-1100-arrested-in-turkey-crackdown-istanbul) to sweep the country in years.

A longtime rival of Turkey’s president, [Recep Tayyip Erdoğan](https://www.theguardian.com/world/recep-tayyip-erdogan), İmamoğlu was accused of corruption, removed from office by the interior ministry and sent to the infamous high-security Silivri prison on the edge of Istanbul. This happened on the same day his party officially declared him a presidential nominee.

Erdoğan has frequently lashed out at the protests, calling them “a movement of violence”, and accusing his main political opponent, the Republican People’s party (CHP), of “shielding those who attack police with stones and axes”, pointing to more than 120 police officers injured during demonstrations.

“Courts held those accountable who committed treason against the national will, and will do so in the future,” he said. “The judiciary will hold those behind any sabotage against the Turkish economy and the wellbeing of the nation accountable.”

A week after the mayor was detained, Istanbul’s prisons were full, and those rounded up at protests are now being transferred to facilities outside the city, the opposition alleges.

Gezgin was taken to a nearby police station along with dozens of others. “They kept him and more than 50 people in detention for four days in that police station. They were not told the charges against them,” said Çiçek.

“As a lawyer, I never saw anything like this before in my life. All of them held in that jail are students and none of them are guilty of anything. Their only crime was protesting, attending a completely legal gathering. This is not a crime under our constitution.”