Who is really weeping for İmamoğlu?

It was unthinkable that the process continuing with Ekrem İmamoğlu's arrest on charges of corruption and bribery and his removal from the Istanbul Metropolitan Mayoralty would not make a great noise. But it would have been far more expected that at least the greater part of the noise would be about the extent reached by the corruption, bribery, gang formation and organized dealings that are the subject of the judicial case.

İmamoğlu is not someone who rose within the CHP's organizations or ascended naturally within the CHP. By the very ways and styles through which he secured his diploma, he first tried a path to enter politics in the AK Party, was not accepted by the AK Party, and went and literally "splashed out money" to find himself a place in the CHP right away, and after finding his place he began to expand it in an aggressive, imperial way. In the end, at every stage he reached, money talked, and he advanced rapidly in appropriating the claims of a political party by demolishing, pouring out, distorting and transforming them.

Of course, up to this point, this situation also gives us a cautionary tale to read about what the CHP has become as a political party, and moreover as the so-called founding party of the Republic of Turkey, in the person of İmamoğlu.

In the present state of affairs, İmamoğlu, right after the Beylikdüzü Mayoralty, presents an interesting style of politics in which he designed the offices he obtained in the Istanbul Metropolitan Mayoralty as a way of "controlling money" and, through it, controlling the party and the whole country. There is no political ideology, no principle, no vision, no performance, no service, no project, no coherent discourse. There is only a sharing. An approach that sees politics as a "bounty" consisting of sharing rather than of service.

A politics based on sharing cannot possibly satisfy people anyway. It is also impossible for such an order not to explode. Even if its explosion before the law were somewhat delayed, this order would explode through the complaints and revolts of those who did not accept that sharing. Indeed, this is how İmamoğlu's style of politics exploded. It is something everyone now knows well: none of the corruption operations launched against İmamoğlu and the other district municipalities was started by the police or judicial bodies spontaneously, through snooping, by gathering intelligence. All of them were started by complaints or confessions from within the CHP, from its own associates, employees, partners or officials.

This part of the matter must not be overlooked. It shows either the existence of a resistance, a revolt from within the party against the aggressive colonial style İmamoğlu displayed in completely finishing off the CHP and transforming it into himself, or a revolt against the discontents produced by the sharing. In both cases the matter is in fact taking place as a problem within the CHP itself. Of course the judiciary's indifference to a matter that comes to it, on account of the political repercussions of touching an opposition party, would produce a different kind of pressure. That the judiciary is the subject of criticism for going after corruption cases creates a truly strange situation, but this is exactly what is being experienced in Turkey in İmamoğlu's case.

If the incident we are living through is an intra-CHP debate and the CHP is in fact being saved by this operation, should the CHP not be pleased with this? Then what is this noise the CHP members are making? What is the meaning of their blaming the government and Erdoğan for this operation for days in Saraçhane, of turning the matter almost into an Erdoğan-İmamoğlu affair? What does it mean that all the radical left groups are staging a parade of columns for a mayor arrested for corruption?

First of all, of course, it means that those so-called radical left groups have no counterpart whatsoever to either their leftism or their radicalism. In the Gezi events too, the bigwigs of finance capitalism, holding placards in their hands saying "We are looters, looters!", had protested, in front of those same radical left groups, the government that implemented the most social policies in Turkey's history. It had revealed what those left groups were doing there while sucking the country's blood through the interest system, and how those so-called left groups operate. The situation had been expressed already without leaving any room for metaphor: They were looters, and still are looters.

The CHP members who set in motion the judicial process that was launched were those disturbed by İmamoğlu's hegemony, but now those who protest this operation by calling it Erdoğan's political operation are probably the same CHP members. What are they trying to do?

Behind these protests, in one respect, there is an interesting demand in which corruption is embraced, internalized and asked to be excused. It does not escape attention that the great majority of those who rushed to the square so easily voice an excuse like "So what if he did it, everyone does it, doesn't the government do it?" No one says, no one can say, "He never did it, all of this is slander." The strongest argument put forward is that what İmamoğlu did, the government is already doing too. May God make our end astonishing.

Second, the classic radical left cliché is at work: sometimes slaughtering with their own hands the militants they want to get rid of and then protesting the fascist state at their funerals, producing a hero, a symbol out of the corpse of someone who was a headache in life, and extracting maximum benefit.

While neutralizing the İmamoğlu danger, whose presence had reached the point of finishing off the CHP and opening it to zoning for his own real estate projects, they turn his absence into an effective argument, a symbol, of cursing the government and opposing Erdoğan. In this style of politics İmamoğlu is now a victim. A crippled, even harmful sacrifice, offered in order to open the way, on behalf of the CHP, for shrewder factions, to "bring them closer" to power within the CHP or in the country.

This is in fact the summary of the matter, but we will probably continue for a long time to hear the tale that İmamoğlu was neutralized as Erdoğan's strongest rival.