For Turks, he is the 'hope of millions'. Now he's in a cell

Popular young student demonstrator snatched off the street by police

- Ruth Michaelson Istanbul

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, 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 to sweep the country in years.

A longtime rival of Turkey's president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, İmamoğlu was accused of corruption, removed from office by the interior ministry and sent to the infamous Silivri prison on the edge of Istanbul. This happened on the same day his party officially declared him a presidential nominee.