Turkish student activists called for a “buy nothing” consumer boycott on Wednesday as part of an expanding civil society campaign seeking to add economic pressure to recent mass demonstrations against the government.
The student campaign runs parallel to a more targeted opposition boycott, which has blacklisted businesses perceived to be linked to government circles and includes a range of companies from coffee shops and book stores to biscuit makers and pro-government media outlets.
In response, Istanbul’s public prosecutor’s office said it was investigating the opposition’s call for a boycott. Senior officials separately described the initiative on Wednesday as “sabotage” and an “assassination attempt” on the national economy.
The boycott forms part of an opposition strategy to build on the street protests that erupted last month following the arrest of Istanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, widely seen as the biggest rival to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
The initiative is also a signal that the opposition Republican People’s party, or CHP, is trying to sustain the public outrage and momentum generated by the jailing of İmamoğlu, which triggered a major market sell-off and sparked fears over growing authoritarianism and the future of Turkish democracy.
The boycotts are a “good thing . . . We should use the power we have as consumers”, said Saadettin Kılıç, a 75-year-old retiree, as he went about his morning rounds on the Asian side of Istanbul. “When I went to the store today to get the newspaper, no one was there . . . It seems to be working.”
İmamoğlu was formally arrested on March 23 on corruption charges and is the subject of a separate terrorism investigation. He has denied all charges. Government officials have said his arrest shows that nobody in Turkey is above the law and that the country’s courts are independent.
Analysts said that the Istanbul court probe and the latest denunciations by senior officials in the ruling Justice and Development party (AKP) were part of a co-ordinated government campaign to delegitimise dissent and prepare the ground for more legal action.
Turkish police have so far detained about 2,000 people over the protests, the biggest in more than a decade. The sometimes unruly daily demonstrations have subsided, but the CHP has said it aims, instead, to hold more controlled rallies around the country every weekend, and in a different Istanbul district each Wednesday.
“The AKP is constructing a criminalisation narrative around the [opposition] boycott,” said Wolfango Piccoli, co-president of consultancy Teneo.
“By portraying it as unlawful and anti-national, government officials are cultivating public and institutional support for legal crackdowns . . . It may also serve to deter civil society and private-sector actors from aligning with CHP-led initiatives,” Piccoli wrote in a note to clients.
On a drizzly Wednesday morning, the first day that financial markets and most shops reopened after the Eid holidays, there were limited signs in the middle-class Istanbul neighbourhood of Üsküdar that either the opposition or student boycotts had much effect.
At Bim, a supermarket chain, shop assistant Ibrahim, 34, who declined to give his surname out of fear of censure amid Turkey’s rising social polarisation, said that he thought the boycott “would have an effect, but nothing big”.
Nevertheless, with Turkey’s economy halfway through a tough three-year stabilisation programme and inflation still running at 39 per cent in February, the government’s response shows it is taking the boycott seriously.
Istanbul’s public prosecutor’s office said late on Tuesday it had determined that any “divisive rhetoric” that sought to hinder economic activity by a part of society could constitute an “incitement to hatred and hostility”.
Several ministers and senior officials then weighed in on Wednesday, with interior minister Ali Yerlikaya denouncing the boycott as “an assassination attempt on our national economy”, in comments reported by state-run Anadolu news agency. Trade minister Ömer Bolat said businesses that lost money due to “economic sabotage” could sue for damages.
The CHP first called for a boycott on March 23, when Özgür Özel, the party’s chair, stood before hundreds of thousands of protesters demonstrating outside City Hall and urged them to boycott companies that he said were profiting from them while supporting the government.
That was followed soon after by İmamoğlu, who called for “millions of people . . . to join the boycott process”, in a social media post apparently sent from prison.
The idea then snowballed. On Tuesday, DBL Entertainment said it had cancelled its participation in a series of big rock concerts it had organised for later this year after its owner called the boycott “treason” and faced a social media storm.
“There seems to be a double process: one organised by the CHP opposition party and the other more spontaneous, led by civil society,” said Berk Esen, an associate professor of political science at Sabanci University in Istanbul. “The concert boycott was not a CHP initiative. The same is true for the consumer boycott.”
Broadening popular support for the boycott would potentially make it harder for the government to portray it as an illegitimate concern. However, Turkish public opinion seems divided on the issue.
Hasan Karakaş, a shopkeeper, said he opposed the boycotts. “You cannot play with people’s bread like this,” he said. “How are people going to pay their families when their bosses don’t give them a pay cheque?”
Others are in favour. Serkan Doğan, a pharmacist, said his business was not on the CHP’s boycott list. But if the boycotts became a regular fixture, he said, “it could become effective as it would show that we can achieve things as a mass group”.
