Graduation ceremonies across Turkey have become flashpoints for student-led protests, with demonstrators condemning the imprisonment of İstanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu and the controversial revocation of his university diploma.
İmamoğlu, a senior member of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) and his party’s presidential candidate for the next election, was detained on March 19 and later arrested on corruption charges criticized as politically motivated. His arrest, widely seen as targeting the biggest political rival to longtime President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in the 2028 presidential election, sparked Turkey’s worst protests since 2013.
A politically charged graduation season
From Ankara to İstanbul, students unfurled banners, chanted slogans and staged demonstrations against what they described as deepening political repression and authoritarianism in the country.
According to the Sözcü newspaper, graduates of Middle East Technical University (ODTÜ) in Ankara filled Devrim Stadium with placards referencing İmamoğlu’s canceled diploma and the police violence that followed his March arrest. Slogans such as “Diploma.pdf could not be erased,” “DIPLOMAtic crisis” and “If they say you have no diploma, you are my witness” were among the most widely shared.
The university’s rector, Ahmet Yozgatlıgil, appointed by a presidential decree in August 2024, was met with persistent jeers and whistles throughout his five-minute commencement speech, according to the report.
Similar scenes unfolded the same day at İstanbul University, which drew national attention in March after revoking İmamoğlu’s 31-year-old diploma, a move widely criticized as politically motivated. Law students disrupted the graduation ceremony, banging on desks in the lecture hall where it took place and chanting to prevent officials from speaking.
The day before his arrest, İstanbul University stripped him of his diploma, effectively disqualifying him from holding or running for public office.
At İstanbul Technical University (İTÜ) a day earlier, students turned their backs on Rector Hasan Mandal, another presidential appointee, during a ceremony on the Ayazağa campus. Whistling and sustained applause drowned out his speech, the T24 news site reported. A parallel protest occurred at the university’s Taşkışla campus, where architecture students interrupted the dean’s remarks with slogans and coordinated clapping.
Earlier this month, a sociology graduate from İstanbul’s Boğaziçi University tore up his diploma on stage in protest. “This diploma is null and void,” said Doruk Dörücü, who denounced what he described as Turkey’s “despotic regime.” He was detained in a police raid the following morning and later released under judicial supervision with a travel ban.
The protests come in the wake of the detention of hundreds of university students and the arrest of dozens in protests that erupted following İmamoğlu’s arrest in March.