Champion of the Turkish opposition, the mayor of Istanbul Ekrem Imamoglu was widely re-elected on Sunday evening, a victory which propels him into the 2028 presidential race. The city councilor, who had made a sensational entrance onto the national political scene five years ago by inflicting his worst electoral setback on Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, repeated his feat by retaining the economic capital of Turkey, despite the efforts made by the head of state who was himself the mayor in the 1990s.
Almost unknown until 2019, the elected representative of the Republican People’s Party (CHP, social democrat) put an end that year to twenty-five years of domination by Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his camp over the largest city in the country. “You have opened the door to a new future today. From tomorrow, Turkey will be another Turkey!”, he said on Sunday evening, in shirt sleeves as usual, at the address voters from Istanbul and Turkey, while a crowd of supporters celebrated his re-election in front of the Istanbul municipality.
“Please everyone”
A charismatic and media personality, the fifty-year-old with thin rimless glasses is in the sights of those in power who had him sentenced, at the end of 2022, to two years and seven months in prison for “insulting” the members of the Turkish High Electoral Committee. The elected official appealed but this sentence, which continues to loom as a threat to his political future, excluded him from the presidential race last year. Regularly ranked among the Turks’ favorite political figures, he has continued to pose as a direct rival to President Erdogan, who recently claimed that these municipal elections were the “last elections” organized under his authority.
During his campaign, Ekrem Imamoglu increased his hoarse voice against the head of state, targeting him more than his defeated rival from the ruling AKP party, Murat Kurum. A practicing Muslim but member of a secular party, this former businessman from the Black Sea, who made his fortune in construction before entering politics, appeals beyond his party. “He can appeal to all segments of the opposition electorate, whether Turkish, Kurdish, Sunni, Alevis, young or old voters,” said Berk Esen, a political scientist at Sabanci University. Istanbul. He notes that the mayor of Istanbul “enjoys a fairly high level of support in different regions of the country.”
His political path favored the needs of his constituents?
The mayor, however, is not unanimous in his camp, sometimes accused of caring more about his political future than his constituents. The pro-Kurdish party DEM (formerly HDP), which joined him in 2019, criticized him for his silence when dozens of its elected officials were removed from office and imprisoned. His opponents claim that he invests more in communication than in preventing seismic risk, which is very high in Istanbul, which city hall figures deny.
“He is someone who for five years has only been interested in issues not linked to Istanbul,” his main opponent said during the campaign. The elected official assures that he works “like an atomic ant” – a reference to a popular cartoon – and boasts of having largely feminized the municipality. He still refuses to call himself a candidate for the supreme office: “There are four years left until 2028. It would be inappropriate for me to talk about that today,” he evaded in a recent interview with the media Medyascope opposition.