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His lawyer said the latest criminal case brought against Istanbul’s mayor, Ekrem Imamoglu, is a “baseless” plot to force one of Turkey’s most popular opposition leaders out of politics.
Imamoglu faces allegations of corruption as part of a case opened last month. The measures are due to meet in November, just months before crucial local elections in which the opposition will seek to take control of Istanbul and the capital, Ankara.
The charismatic Imamoglu is seen as one of the most important figures in the Turkish opposition, and a candidate one day to challenge President Recep Tayyip Erdogan or his successor. Erdogan’s determination to regain control of the country’s two largest cities has made Imamoglu’s fate a test case for whether the strongman leader’s third decade in power will be marked by a more authoritarian turn.
“Be certain of one thing: The way these cases are administered in Turkey has absolutely nothing to do with the law. The law is being used as a tool,” Gokhan Günaydin, legal advisor to the opposition Republican People’s Party, which represents Imamoglu, said in an interview.
Imamoglu is already facing a political ban after a court ruled in December that he had insulted public officials who ordered the rerun of his first election victory as mayor in 2019, which he eventually won. The United States described the verdict, which Imamoglu is appealing against, as “inconsistent with respect for human rights, fundamental freedoms and the rule of law.”
Erdogan’s government has long been accused of using the judiciary to silence dissidents. Analysts say his grip on Turkish courts has tightened after thousands of judges were purged in the aftermath of the 2016 coup attempt.
“The Turkish judiciary has never been independent,” said Emma Sinclair-Webb, Turkey chief of Human Rights Watch. But now “it has increasingly come under government control and has been used as a tool by Erdogan’s presidency to silence critics, to remove perceived opponents or those who dislike him from the political scene or from civil society.”
Imamoglu and six others are accused in the second case brought by the Istanbul public prosecutor of irregularities in awarding bids for public contracts. He is accused among other crimes of impropriety in a public tender process and causing a loss to the public of about 250,000 Turkish liras, according to the indictment seen by the Financial Times. This was in a previous position as mayor of a city suburb.
His lawyer Günaydin said the allegations were “baseless” and that “there is really no aspect of this case that can be explained by law”. The Turkish Ministry of Justice did not respond to a request for comment on the case.
It’s too early to judge the case, but it appears to be an example of “selective justice,” said Kerem Gulay, a law professor at Istanbul’s Koc University, since there are often irregularities in municipal bidding processes that go uninvestigated.
He added that the close timing of the second case against Imamoglu to the previous conviction showed “that there is a pattern here, and it seems very important.”
Imamoglu’s troubles are not the first time that opposition politicians in Turkey have clashed with prosecutors. Selahattin Demirtas, who led the left-wing People’s Democratic Party, has been in a Turkish prison since 2016 on terrorism charges stemming from his political speeches, even though the European Court of Human Rights has ruled his detention unlawful. Mansur Yavas, the mayor of Ankara from the CHP, was acquitted in 2020 of charges of misusing promissory notes when he was working as a lawyer.
According to the indictment, the last case against Imamoglu was opened after a referral from the Minister of Interior led by Suleyman Soylu, a hardline figure who ran the ministry from 2016 until last month.
“This is an attack. It is likely that a few more cases will come up where (inspectors) demand case files going back 30 years on my construction sites,” Imamoglu told reporters on June 22, referring to a time when Imamoglu was running his family’s construction company. .
It’s not a legal process — it’s a political decision on the part of the government,” said Howard Eisenstadt, a Turkey specialist at St. Lawrence University in New York State and the Middle East Institute in Washington. Court cases are adjudicated not by law but by Erdogan’s own political calculations.
The real question is whether the risks of banning Imamoglu are greater than the potential rewards.
