Turkey's opposition leader will step up his challenge to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Sunday when he addresses a mass rally at the end of an nearly one month-long "justice" march from Ankara to Istanbul.
Republican People's Party leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu launched the 450-kilometer (280-mile) march after a parliamentarian from his party was imprisoned in June.
Huge crowds have packed central Istanbul at a mass rally in Istanbul to protest against President Erdogan's rule. The march grew into a protest of the massive clampdown on people with alleged links to terror groups that began after a coup attempt last summer.
"If you are launching a march for terrorists and for their supporters, something which you have never thought about doing against terrorist groups, you can convince no one that your aim is justice", he said.
Carrying a simple insignia emblazoned with the word "Justice" without any party slogans, Kilicdaroglu initiated the march after his party's lawmaker Enis Berberoglu, a former journalist, was sentenced to 25 years in jail on charges of leaking classified information to a newspaper. "July 9 is a new step". Hundreds of thousands have already gathered for a rally marking the end of the march.
CHP officials told AFP that numbers at the rally could be more than two million but this could not be immediately confirmed.
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Walking around 20 km a day, the slight, bespectacled 68-year-old politician attracted relatively modest support in the first stages of his march.
Since leaving Ankara, the opposition chief has dressed every day modestly in a white shirt, dark pants, with a hat to protect him from the sun.
Kilicdaroglu said he had marched for all of Turkey's population of almost 80 million.
"Erdogan has accused Kilicdaroglu's party of siding with terrorism while Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said Friday: "(The march) has started to become boring.
Kilicdaroglu has been followed by thousands of supporters along the way, including CHP deputies. Around 50,000 people have been arrested and 150,000, including teachers, judges and soldiers, suspended.
"Why did we march?" But the government has dismissed the march as a bothersome stunt. "We want politics kept out of the judiciary, the (army) barracks and of mosques". Turkey claims the coup was led by a cleric, Fethullah Gulen, who has been living in self-imposed exile in the United States for almost two decades.
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