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In the local elections on Sunday 31 March in Turkey, the opposition to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan won in the country’s two main cities, the capital Ankara and Istanbul. Attention was focused above all on Istanbul, the most important city in the country, where the centre-left mayor, Ekrem Imamoglu, was reconfirmed for a second term.
Even before the elections, Imamoglu was considered the best-known opposition politician to Erdogan: now he has unequivocally become the Turkish president’s main opponent, and a natural candidate for the next presidential elections in 2028. He is a member of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), a party that tends to be centre-left although with some nationalist elements.
Sunday’s local elections were particularly important for Erdogan. In the previous elections, in 2019, his party lost control of many major cities, including Istanbul, where Erdogan was born and began his political career. The situation was reversed in the 2023 presidential elections, in which Erdogan managed to win and obtain a third mandate, while the opposition parties weakened.
Now the president had given himself the explicit objective of “taking back the cities” that had been won by the opposition five years ago, starting with Istanbul. In short, he hoped that Sunday’s elections would confirm that he “no longer has any formidable opponents”. said by Soner Cagaptay, a leading international expert on Türkiye. However, things went differently: with almost complete voting, in Istanbul Imamoglu obtained 51 percent of the votes against 39 percent for Murat Kurum, former minister of the Erdogan government.
Imamoglu during his victory speech in the local elections on March 31 (EPA/ERDEM SAHIN)
Imamoglu is 54 years old. He was born in Akçaabat, a coastal city in the province of Trabzon, on the Black Sea, he studied economics at Istanbul University and before entering politics he worked as a building contractor. He is married, has three children, and like Erdogan is passionate about football: as a young man he was a footballer and CEO of the football team of his hometown.
Football is not the only thing that Imamoglu and Erdogan have in common: they both come from the Black Sea area, they are both skilled communicators, they have both been mayors of Istanbul and have faced legal problems. After the 2019 elections Imamoglu was condemned to two and a half years in prison for insulting some electoral officials (he appealed and there has not yet been an appeal sentence). The episode was compared by several analysts to the conviction received by Erdogan for inciting religious hatred in 1999. At that time Erdogan was the mayor of Istanbul: he was condemned for how he modified a poem by the Turkish intellectual Ziya Gökalp, reciting it during a rally.
Last year a was also started against Imamoglu procedure judicial on the basis of allegations of fraud in tenders. The case is still ongoing, but there are those believes that the accusations are politically motivated and that the proceedings are essentially a way to hinder Imamoglu’s career, in a country where the judiciary it is not independent.
(AP Photo/Francisco Seco)
Imamoglu is a very popular politician. Winning the elections in 2019 pose fine 25 years of government by Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP): Imamoglu won twice, because after his first victory Erdogan imposed a repeat vote, which Imamoglu won again.
In the last five years, during his mandate as mayor of Istanbul, he has become a very well-known politician in Turkey, so much so that many expected him to run for the Turkish presidential elections as early as 2023 (he did not, and the opposition chose the secretary of the CHP Kemal Kilicdaroglu, later defeated by Erdogan). Imamoglu’s notoriety has grown despite various campaign state media to discredit him, and despite the fact that Erdogan took credit for many of the projects that modernized Istanbul during his tenure.