A 16-year-old boy has been arrested and convicted in Turkey for drawing a mustache on one of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s campaign posters, Turkish media reported Tuesday.
This high school student from Mersin, on Turkey’s southeastern coast, was accused of “drawing Hitler’s mustache with a ballpoint pen and writing offensive remarks” on a poster of the Turkish head of state pasted near his home, according to ‘media’ close to the opposition, such as the daily newspapers BirGun, Cumhuriyet and the private television channel Halk TV.
The teenager was identified thanks to surveillance cameras and was detained in the family home and questioned by the Youth Brigade, to whom he “admitted to pulling the mustache but denied the insults”.
The young Turk, present at the prosecution, was immediately charged with “insulting the president” and arrested in the center for minors in Tarsus Prison, near Mersin, according to Halk TV.
“Insulting the president” is one of the most common accusations in Turkey, having been uttered 16,753 times in 2022, according to Justice Ministry statistics.
Erdogan became prime minister in 2003 after his Islamist AKP party won the 2001 elections and, after being re-elected twice, became president in 2014, for the first time by direct elections, thanks to a then-recent constitutional reform.
Although the position required neutrality, Erdogan continued to steer Turkish policy from the presidency and finally legalized this situation in 2017, through a referendum that abolished the position of prime minister and gave the president full executive powers.
After his re-election in 2018, Erdogan won 49.5 percent of the vote in the first round of Turkey’s presidential election on May 14, a vote he would eventually win in the second, where he garnered 52.2 percent, against the candidate who was supported. by the opposition, Kemal Kiliçdaroglu (47.8%).
Source: DN
