Turkey has been shaken by massive demonstrations since the popular mayor Imamoglu was arrested in a dawn raid at his home on Wednesday, accused of corruption and supporting a terrorist organization.
On Sunday, a court decided that he should be prosecuted and imprisoned pending a trial, and the politician has been taken to Silivri Prison outside Istanbul.
And just hours later, the Ministry of the Interior announced that he would be dismissed as mayor of Turkey's largest city. At the same time, two of his party colleagues, both mayors of districts in the metropolis, were also dismissed.
"The ongoing legal process is not a legal process. It is a summary execution", Imamoglu wrote on X some hours before the news of his dismissal came.
He had already written on the same platform:
"I will not give in".
Not surprised
Jenny White, professor at the Institute for Turkey Studies at Stockholm University, is not directly surprised by the news that Ekrem Imamoglu is being dismissed as Istanbul's mayor.
The government is doing what they have done before, appointing their own people as mayors. They have done so with Kurdish mayors for several years, she says.
Opinion polls show that Imamoglu would defeat President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the next election, and the arrest has been criticized as staged to get rid of him before the election. Government representatives deny this and claim that the judiciary is acting independently.
This has not stopped hundreds of thousands from taking to the streets in large protests – despite the authorities having issued a ban on demonstrations.
Election of presidential candidate
On Sunday, Imamoglu's party CHP is holding a primary election to select a presidential candidate, a vote that Imamoglu is expected to win.
CHP's former party leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu, who lost the election to Erdogan in 2023, told Turkish media when he cast his vote that:
We must fight for democracy everywhere, in every corner, at any cost.
The party has opened the election to all Turkish citizens, not just party members, in the hope of gaining even greater support for the arrested mayor. The result of the vote is expected later on Sunday.
I am quite convinced that most people will vote for Imamoglu. It creates a strange situation when a person who is imprisoned is likely to be elected as presidential candidate, says Jenny White.
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The Republic of Turkey was proclaimed in 1923 with the founding father Kemal Atatürk as president. It was to be a modern nation-state with universal suffrage to a parliament, but until the 1950 election, only one party, the Republican People's Party (CHP), was allowed.
CHP, today the largest opposition party, traditionally describes itself as secular and social democratic.
The military has intervened in politics several times, both deposing and appointing leaders. Throughout the 1990s, the country was ruled by short-lived coalition governments.
In 2001, the current president and former Istanbul mayor Recep Tayyip Erdogan founded the conservative Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP). It has ruled the country since 2002. Erdogan was prime minister between 2003 and 2014, when he took over the presidency from Abdullah Gül.
Democracy has gradually been dismantled as the president has taken control of, or shut down, regime-critical media. With a constitutional amendment in 2017 and further legislative changes and decrees after the re-election in 2018, Erdogan has reshaped the state apparatus in a way that essentially means that parliamentarism has been replaced by a presidential system. At the same time, Erdogan has given Islam an increasingly prominent place in politics.
Sources: UI and others
