Istanbul (AFP) – Waving flags and chanting slogans, hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators rallied in Istanbul Saturday calling for democracy to be defended after the arrest of mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in over a decade.

Ozgur Ozel, leader of the main opposition party CHP which organised the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but AFP was unable to independently confirm the figures.

The mass protests, which began with Imamoglu’s March 19 detention, have prompted a repressive government response that has been sharply condemned by rights groups and drawn criticism from abroad.

Widely seen as the only Turkish politician capable of challenging President Recep Tayyip Erdogan at the ballot box, Imamoglu was elected as the opposition CHP’s candidate for the 2028 presidential race on the day he was jailed.

He was resoundingly re-elected mayor last year for the third time. The anger over his arrest quickly spread from Istanbul across Turkey.

Nightly protests outside Istanbul City Hall drew vast crowds and often degenerated into running battles with riot police, who used teargas, pepper spray and rubber bullets to disperse the protesters.

Opposition chief Ozel told French newspaper Le Monde the Saturday rallies would from now on be a weekly event in cities across Turkey, alongside a weekly Wednesday night demo in Istanbul.

Student groups have kept up their own protests, most of them masked, in the face of a police crackdown that has seen nearly 2,000 people arrested.

The authorities have also cracked down on media coverage, arresting 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deporting a BBC correspondent and arresting a Swedish reporter who flew into Istanbul to cover the unrest.

Eleven journalists were freed Thursday, among them AFP photographer Yasin Akgul.

Swedish journalist Joakim Medin, who flew into Turkey on Thursday to cover the demonstrations, was jailed on Friday, his employer Dagens ETC told AFP.

Reporters Without Borders’ Turkey representative Erol Onderoglu said Medin had been charged with “insulting the president” – a charge often use to silence Erdogan’s critics.

“The judicial pressure systematically brought to bear on local journalists for a long time is now being brought to bear on their foreign colleagues,” he told AFP.

Turkish authorities held BBC journalist Mark Lowen for 17 hours on Wednesday before deporting him for posing “a threat to public order”, the broadcaster said.

Turkish officials said it was due to “a lack of accreditation”.

Baris Altintas, co-director of MLSA, a legal NGO helping many of the detainees, told AFP the authorities “seem to be very determined on limiting coverage of the protests”.

He added: “We fear that the crackdown on the press will not only continue but also increase.”