Ozgur Ozel, leader of Turkey’s main opposition party, has hit out at UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his British Labour Party for largely remaining silent over the arrest and jailing of Istanbul Mayor and presidential candidate Ekrem Imamoglu.

Speaking on Turkish television, Ozel, who heads the Republican People’s Party (CHP), said Labour would “face consequences from me”. He threatened to block the UK Labour Party’s application for readmission to the Socialist International, an international alliance of centre-left parties, over the lack of declared support for Imamoglu, widely viewed as a politician who could beat Turkish president of 22 years Recep Tayyip Erdogan in a presidential election.

The Republican People’s Party (CHP), chaired by Ozel, officially named Imamoglu as its presidential candidate earlier last month, shortly after his arrest.

The lack of support expressed by the UK and other Western countries is an added burden for Ozel and the CHP as they struggle to keep up the momentum of protest against Turkey’s regime.

Labour took a week to respond to the plight of Imamoglu and the mass street demonstrations over his March 19 arrest that broke out across the country. It then limited its response to a general declaration of support for democracy in Turkey.

The US, meanwhile, has said that it will not be commenting on the Imamoglu controversy as it would regard this as interfering in another country’s internal affairs. US President Donald Trump’s sole comment on Turkey last week was, “Good place, good leader”.

Europe’s two other biggest powers, France and Germany, have been somewhat more critical of the Imamoglu situation than the UK, but at the same time their comments have been markedly restrained.

On the transactional side in relations, UK and Turkey have close economic and defence ties. London is presently negotiating a major sale of Eurofighter Typhoon jets to Ankara, reportedly worth around $10bn.

Eurocrats have long pointed to the abysmal state of Turkey’s treatment of the rule of law and basic human rights as partly explaining why the country’s application to join the EU has been essentially frozen for years, but at the same time Brussels remains wary of destabilising the deal it has with Ankara on migration—Turkey agreed to stop refugees reaching the European bloc via its territory in exchange for a deal worth over €9bn ($9.7bn).

Also, as Europe pursues a massive rearmament and redesigns its security architecture to be ready for any future military threat a hostile Russia could pose, without the need to depend on assistance from the US, European capitals will remain mindful of what role Turkey—which boasts the second largest army in Nato—could play in its defence and huge expansion of arms production.

In a commentary published on April 1, Carnegie think tank analysts Marc Pierini and Francesco Siccardi argue that Turkey’s interaction with the emerging “coalition of the willing”, formed of countries apart from the US that seek to defend Ukraine and Europe from militaristic Russia, should be limited to individual countries’ purchases of Turkish-made armaments outside EU funding.

They conclude: “Europeans are used to Ankara’s foreign policy ambiguities. But in designing a new system of alliances to protect a future ceasefire deal in Ukraine and contain Russia’s expansionism in such critical times, they have to carefully balance Turkey’s assets and liabilities.

“Accepting Turkey into the coalition of the willing because of its weapons supplies while ignoring the dramatic degradation of its rule of law would give a free pass to Moscow’s and Washington’s aggressive stances. That would allow Turkey’s leadership to score a success for its style of governance and, ultimately, hurt Europe’s values and principles.”