A high-profile political arrest in Istanbul threatens to divide a country that has divergent opinions about the president who has been in power for 11 years.
By Brian Taylor, Senior Editor
While political maneuvers in North America have given metals recyclers plenty to consider in 2025, those concerns may now be joined by political turmoil in Turkey—the single largest buyer of exported recycled steel from the United States.
Turkey has longstanding status as the leading buyer of ferrous scrap exported from the U.S. and Europe, and that status has remained in place throughout the tenure of current president Recep Erdoğan, who took office in 2014.
As a series of strong earthquakes in 2022 demonstrated, however, should purchases from Turkey be interrupted even briefly, it can affect the U.S. recycled steel market. That can be especially true for scrap processors and shippers in the eastern one-third of the U.S., from where Turkey-bound cargoes are shipped.
The source of concern this week stems from the sudden arrest of the mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoglu. The mayor of the nation’s largest city was expected to run against President Erdoğan later this decade, with polls indicating he had a chance to win.
To what extent popular support will break toward the mayor likely will play out in late March. Early reactions, though, included an initial 7 percent drop in value in the benchmark Turkish stock index and the already weak Turkish lira declining further in value against the U.S. dollar when the news broke.
According to news agencies, protests in Istanbul were met with a heavy police presence this Wednesday, and the governor in the region reportedly banned all protests for four days.
Those same news services have reported protestors who braved the crackdown as referring to Erdoğan as a dictator and urging the president of 11 years to resign.
For scrap traders, wider turmoil on a national scale beyond Istanbul presents the foremost concern, with much of Turkey’s scrap-fed electric arc furnace (EAF) steelmaking activity located away from the population center.
Calls for general strikes by Turkish labor unions have occurred both before and since Erdoğan has been the president there, although a report distributed online earlier this year by the Association for Critical Sociology concludes, “In Turkey, legal strikes have been on the decline since the mid-1990s. This is a trend that has accelerated since the mid-2010s under [a court ruling], as the government increasingly resorted to banning legal strikes against a backdrop of increasing autocratization.”
However, lead author Alpkan Birelma refers to a wave of automotive industry strikes in 2015 by writing in part, “Particularly noteworthy is that it [was] primarily the workers themselves, without union support, who organized this strike wave.”
Any disruption caused by internal Turkish politics would come at a time when a trade group representing many of the nation’s recycled-content steel rebar producers already is sounding an alarm that tariffs and other global trade conditions are working against their interests.
