By the Workers’ Democracy Party, IWU-FI section in Turkey
28 March 2025. The mass mobilisations, triggered by the arrest, repression, and intervention operations launched by the Erdoğan regime against Ekrem İmamoğlu, the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality (İBB), the municipalities of Şişli and Beylikdüzü, and more than a hundred people on the morning of 19 March 2025, have continued to grow for a week.
The protests, initially motivated by the deprivation of the right to elect and be elected, have quickly coalesced around the accumulated indignation because of the regime’s continued policies of repression, the widespread restriction of democratic rights and freedoms in all areas, the lack of future prospects, and the impoverishment exacerbated by the economic crisis.
From the beginning, university students have taken a leading role, driving the mobilisations with the academic boycott organised at many universities. Hundreds of thousands of people in many cities, squares, and neighbourhoods, especially in Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir, continue to fill the streets to defend their democratic rights and freedoms.
Repression, Arrests, and Violence Against the Demonstrations
The regime uses intimidation tactics, including excessive force and dawn arrests. Erdoğan accused protestors in defence of their democratic rights of “creating terrorism in the streets,” thus facilitating this massive repression.
Although this repression began as a specific attempt to intimidate the student movement, it is now also directed against journalists, trade unionists, and comrades in various socialist parties. The education union Eğitim-Sen held a one-day strike to support the academic boycott, and its workers, is being directly targeted by the regime.
The Erdoğan regime seeks to eliminate freedom of assembly and demonstration, further restricting working people’s right to information. In this context, many journalists have been arrested, several independent media accounts have been blocked on social media, and the RTÜK (Radio and Television Supreme Council threatened media outlets attempting to cover events from the squares).
The regime does not tolerate even the “d” for democracy or the “l” for freedoms. Behind this violence and arrests, they seek to thwart the mobilisations that have disrupted their plans. The operation against İmamoğlu and the intervention against the İBB were halted precisely thanks to these mobilisations. However, these illegal attempts at intimidation curb popular determination and anger against the regime.
The Masses and the Limits of CHP Leadership
After initially avoiding direction, CHP leaders now control daily Saraçhane protests, focusing on students. The CHP, whose class character leads it to avoid any mobilisation that escapes its control, has resorted to various tactics. First, it attempted to channel the protests toward the 23 March polls to elect the next presidential candidate. Although this call received significant support, the CHP leaders consciously avoid offering an actual line of struggle to break with the regime.
Given the scale of the repression and the strength of the mobilisations, the CHP has avoided formulating concrete, urgent demands, such as clearly demanding the “immediate release of İmamoğlu.” Nor has it organised an effective defence against the trusteeship intervention (kayyum) in the Şişli Municipality. It distorted the student demand for a general strike, which invokes the productive power of unions and workers, proposing instead a vague “consumer strike.”
These political stances, along with Özgür Özel’s farewell speech on 25 March in Saraçhane, clearly show that the CHP leaders prefer to contain the struggle rather than advance it, to remain within the existing order rather than break with it, thus defending the interests of the party apparatus and its ruling class, not those of workers, youth, women, LGBTI+ people, the Kurdish people, and oppressed sectors.
The political stance of this opposition within the system is not surprising to us. The determination and clarity of the struggling masses far exceed that of the CHP leaders. However, the CHP centralised politically the movement. Demand this leadership create a plan to free all political prisoners, including İmamoğlu, forcing regime retreat. This can only be achieved through the use of the productive power of the working class, not through symbolic campaigns. We also invite the masses who politically support the CHP to exert pressure in this direction.
Our strength comes from production; we no longer have the strength to consume!
The absence of an alternative independent of the regime and the traditional opposition, capable of uniting democratic, economic, and social demands to break with the repressive regime, remains decisive. As the Party of Workers’ Democracy, we have long called this alternative the “Workers’ Alliance.” An alliance that unites democratic mobilisation with the economic struggle for decent wages and conditions.
Effective struggle requires concrete demands and tools, rejecting passive approaches like boycotts, especially with poverty and low wages. This implies not containing, student and popular mobilisations.
This requires proposing a line of struggle for workers who no longer have consumer power, which will increase pressure on their unions to utilise their productive power. It requires action so that the Türk-İş (Turkish Union Confederation) leadership stops burying its head in the sand, so that DİSK (Revolutionary Unions Confederation) goes beyond symbolic declarations, and so that all labour and public workers’ unions formulate an action plan in defence of democratic and social rights. Union delegates, especially from Türk-İş, DİSK, and KESK, should convene meetings and mobilise to pressure their unions for action.
No democratic rights are guaranteed under this regime! Therefore, the mobilisations must grow until they achieve an actual break with Erdoğan’s One Man regime.
The boycott committees created by university students to organise the academic boycott are a signal to ensure keeping mobilisation and create the tools to sustain it. Similarly, in many neighbourhoods across the country, the working population takes to the streets every night to demand their rights. Let us strengthen our self-organisation in the workplaces, neighbourhoods, and universities to keep the struggle against the regime and the economic collapse alive!
This mobilisation calls on socialist parties, democratic popular organisations, unions, professional associations, and militant sectors to discuss and agree on a program of action and to build a national alternative to the mobilisations. Because the solution lies in united struggle, the solution lies in the Workers’ Alliance!
No to the usurpation of the right to elect and be elected, nor to the attack on freedom of assembly and demonstration!
Enough with the repression, violence, arrests, and imprisonment! Immediate end to the arrests! Immediate release for political prisoners!
Immediate end to the trusteeship regime in municipalities, universities, and throughout the country!Let’s fight and mobilise for our democratic, economic, and social rights!
Workers’ Democracy Party
27 March 2025
