This is Democracy Now. Democracy Now.org, the War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman.

In Turkey, mass nationwide protests took place on Monday for a six night following the arrest and jailing of the Istanbul mayor, Ekram Imamolu, who is seen as the biggest political rival to Turkey's authoritarian

president, Recep Taye Erdogan, ahead of the 28 presidential elections.

Over the past week, Turkish authorities have detained more than 1,100 protesters.

On Monday, at least eight reporters and photojournalists were arrested in what the

Turkish media union called an attack on press freedoms and the people's right to learn the truth.

We are joined right now by the Turkish political scientist, Dr. Esge Basharan.

She's an associate faculty member at Oxford University, a former journalist who gained recognition for her coverage of Turkey's Kurdish conflict.

Esgi Bashidan runs the substack angle, anchor, and voice.

Thank you so much for being with us, Esge.

If you can start off by just explaining to a global audience, what is happening in Turkey?

Yeah.

Thanks for having me, Amy.

I think I'm going to just report back a decade ago, just very briefly, so that I think

it's important for Western audiences to understand that this hasn't happened all of a sudden.

It was a gradual and incremental process that started in 2010.

I'm going to tell you the story of a state capture, which started with the capture of the judiciary, the weaponization

of judiciary, which nowadays, I think my American friends are getting to know quite well.

So it was in 2010, AKP pushed a constitutional referendum claiming that would democratize the judiciary

and the EU backed that, those reform packages.

What it did was it opened the door for loyalists, Adon's loyalist, and loyalists of the Gulen movement back then

an ally, a secretive organization, Islamic organization, whose exiled cleric died in Pennsylvania

...