ISTANBUL (Reuters) – Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday called for legal proceedings to take their course after the conviction of one of his main opponents, Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, who appealed the judgment.
Ekrem Imamoglu, a potential rival to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the 2023 presidential election in Turkey, was sentenced on Wednesday to two years and seven months in prison and a term of ineligibility for insulting officials.
The decision, which the elected representative of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), described as “political and illegitimate”, must still be confirmed on appeal, which could take several weeks or months. The election is due to take place by June 2023.
The opposition has so far chosen no common candidate but Ekrem Imamoglu, due to his popularity, is considered a potentially dangerous rival for Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in power for nearly twenty years.
In his first public statements since the court decision, the Turkish president said he did not care about the identity of his opponent for the presidential election.
“There is no final judgment yet. The case will be submitted to the Court of Appeal and then to the Court of Cassation,” he said during a public meeting in Mardin, in the south-west. east of Turkey.
“If justice has made a mistake, it will be corrected. They are trying to drag us into their little game,” he added.
“There have been a number of court decisions which we ourselves have severely condemned, but that does not give anyone the right to insult the judges or ignore the judgments,” the Turkish president said.
Ekrem Imamoglu had described as “fools”, in a speech, the electoral officials who had canceled his narrow victory in the municipal elections of March 2019 at the expense of the candidate of the AKP (Party of Justice and Development), the party in to be able to.
In a new election held three months later, he won the mayor’s office by a wide margin, ending 25 years of AKP rule over the city of 17 million.
Thousands of Turks demonstrated on Thursday to denounce his conviction.
(Azra Ceylan report; written by Jonathan Spicer; French version Jean-Stéphane Brosse and Sophie Louet)