There is no record of Ekrem Imamoğlu, the erstwhile Istanbul mayor, and Selahattin Demirtaş, Turkey’s most successful Kurdish leader, ever having met, yet their fates are intertwined. Imamoğlu sits in Silivri maximum security prison on the outskirts of Istanbul, Demirtaş a hundred miles away in Edirne maximum security prison, close to the Greek and Bulgarian land borders. Both are political prisoners of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, from different parties and ideological backgrounds, but targeted for the same reason. After more than 22 years in power, Erdoğan has taken almost total control of his party, the state, and now the opposition. He has learned how to exploit electoral demographics and fractures, in part by trading off rivals such as Imamoğlu and Demirtaş like pawns.

Nine years ago, Demirtaş sat in the southeastern city of Mardin and told me, quite calmly, that he was expecting his arrest. As the charismatic co-chair of the People’s Democratic Party (HDP), the former lawyer had stretched his party’s appeal beyond its Kurdish base and won votes from young liberal Turks, taking a bigger-than-expected share in parliamentary elections and depriving President Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) of its outright majority for the first time.

Soon after that, however, Ankara’s peace process with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) broke down and Demirtaş and his party were framed by Erdoğan as terrorists – a convenient way for the president to clear aside a man who had turned into a serious rival. Within months, Demirtaş’ prediction in Mardin had come to pass. He was arrested alongside 11 other HDP deputies, and remains incarcerated, having been sentenced to 42 years in prison for various terror crimes.

Demirtaş may now finally be on the brink of freedom. Erdoğan’s ultra-nationalist ally, Devlet Bahçeli, has said that the legal process against Demirtaş has concluded and his release would be ‘beneficial’ – a sharp turnaround from his previously staunch anti-Kurdish position. Earlier this month, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Demirtaş’ continuing imprisonment breaches his right to liberty, and that some of the charges against him are politically motivated. Erdoğan has previously dismissed multiple ECHR rulings, despite Turkey being a signatory to the court’s convention. This time, though, he said that the judiciary will decide on Demirtaş’ fate: hardly a firm guarantee of his freedom, but at least an open door.

Crucially, since the start of this year, Erdoğan has also been rebooting the PKK peace process. Ankara’s war on Kurdish separatism over the past decade was two-pronged, with the militarised crackdown on the PKK accompanied by political and cultural repression. Following local elections in 2019, scores of HDP mayors across the southeast were removed from their posts, and the party was eventually closed and reconstituted under a new name in 2023. Thousands of PKK militants, including youth fighters, civilians and Turkish security forces, were killed in clashes. The PKK is now a diminished fighting force and Kurdish politics no longer poses a threat to Erdoğan’s electoral dominance, allowing him to create a controlled opening for peace and Kurdish engagement solely on his terms.

Now, Imamoğlu is enduring a mirror image of Demirtaş’ plight. Twice elected mayor of Istanbul in 2019 and 2024 for the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), Imamoğlu, like Demirtaş before him, seemed to be transcending his party roots to appeal to the city’s wide demographic base. Imamoğlu was days away from being officially nominated as the opposition’s presidential candidate when he was arrested in March on corruption charges. This week, prosecutors sought a 2,352-year prison sentence for 142 charges levelled against him.

Imamoğlu, too, must have expected that his arrest would come, months or even years before dozens of officers raided his house at dawn. Erdoğan has been escalating a crackdown on the CHP since the last local elections in 2024, in which Imamoğlu won a second term in Istanbul and the party took sweeping victories across all the urban centres and many former AKP strongholds. District and city mayors from the CHP have been removed from office on corruption and terror charges and replaced with caretakers appointed directly from central government – the same way takeovers were enacted against HDP municipalities in 2019.

Erdoğan’s shift from targeting Kurdish politics to targeting the CHP was driven by the personal threat of Demirtaş, and then Imamoğlu, but also by wider calculations. Strikes against the Kurds were good domestic currency after 2015, when PKK-linked forces in Syria began posing a threat to Turkish ambitions. As well as the war in southeastern Turkey, Erdoğan launched multiple offensives against Kurdish forces in Syria and Iraq, drawing opprobrium from western allies but winning jingoistic support at home.

More recently, however, Erdoğan has run out of room for new assaults on the Kurds overseas, and the war on home soil is largely won. The HDP never again reached the level of popularity that it did in Demirtaş’ era, and the threat he once posed has been quelled. For a period, the CHP took the HDP’s place as a party representing a broad opposition to Erdoğan rather than narrow factional interests – and as soon as that happened, Erdoğan turned his attention there.

In October, Imamoğlu sent a message from his cell in Silivri, to Demirtaş, in Edirne. ‘The measure of the government’s sincerity lies in Mr Demirtaş’ release,’ he said.

Demirtaş’ release now seems near, yet the Turkey and the world he is reemerging into are fundamentally changed. Erdoğan has shifted executive power from the parliament to the presidency, and remodelled that office in his own image, appointing loyal ministers who work under him like a Sun King. The media is even more cowed, and the opposition more chaotic, than in 2016.

Meanwhile, countries that once decried Demirtaş’ arrest have stayed mostly silent about Imamoğlu’s plight, weighing that Turkey is too important to the western alliance against Putin’s Russia to risk alienating Erdoğan. Imamoğlu must surely now be wondering whether his own incarceration will last as long as that of Demirtaş – and what kind of Turkey he will eventually reemerge into.