Turkish police arrested Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, a Social Democrat, on Wednesday as part of a judicial investigation into alleged corruption and "collaboration with terrorist groups," a reference to Kurdish armed groups.
A large police force surrounded the mayor's home in the early hours of the morning and searched his house, arresting the mayor and numerous of his associates, as well as municipal officials from the same party, the Social Democratic Party of the People's Party (CHP).
Imamoglu won the Istanbul mayoralty in the 2019 elections, ending a quarter-century of Islamist municipal rule, and was re-elected in elections in March last year. becoming the most likely rival of Türkiye's Islamist president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in the upcoming presidential elections.
The CHP is demanding that these elections, scheduled for 2028, be brought forward and had called for primaries across Turkey to designate its candidate next Sunday, assuming it would be Imamoglu.
Just yesterday, Istanbul University, where Imamoglu earned his degree in business administration in 1994, revoked his diploma citing irregularities in his 1990 admissions, which would block his presidential candidacy, as a university degree is a mandatory requirement for becoming president.
Furthermore, the Prosecutor's Office has opened several investigations against the mayor and other figures in his party in recent months, and two district councilors have been remanded in custody.
The two legal cases now open against Imamoglu and 106 people from his entourage or the CHP accuse the councilman, on the one hand, of being the head of a profit-making criminal organization, involved in acts of corruption, bribery, and rigged bids.
On the other hand, he is accused of having ties to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), the Kurdish guerrilla group in Turkey, through the initiative known as "Urban Consensus," which the CHP and the pro-Kurdish left-wing DEM party launched ahead of the March 2024 municipal elections.
Through this strategy, several figures close to the DEM, the third party in the Turkish Parliament, joined the CHP, while many regular DEM voters supported the social democratic party. which thus became the most voted party in Türkiye for the first time in decades, ousting the AKP, Erdogan's Islamist party.
The raid against Imamoglu and his associates was carried out with a massive police presence, public transportation access in the city center was closed, and the governor's office announced a ban on protest demonstrations or marches for the next four days, until Sunday.
Agencies contributed to this Aurora article.