Berlin Mayor Kai Wegner has canceled a trip to İstanbul planned for early April due to the Sunday arrest of the city’s popular mayor, Ekrem İmamoğlu, according to a statement from his press office.
“I view the developments in Turkey, the imprisonment and suspension of the freely elected mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoğlu, with great concern,” Wegner said in a statement released by his press office on Wednesday.
İmamoğlu, who was detained in a police operation along with dozens of others on March 19, was arrested on Sunday on corruption charges. Along with two district mayors in İstanbul, who were also arrested, he was subsequently removed from office, a development that has sparked nationwide protests in Turkey.
The Berlin mayor, from the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), said rule of law, an independent judiciary, fair political competition and free elections must be guaranteed in a democracy while expressing his solidarity with the jailed mayor.
“Given the ongoing detention of my counterpart, I will cancel my trip planned for early April. Solidarity with Ekrem Imamoğlu.”
İstanbul is one of Berlin’s numerous sister cities around the world. Wegner received İmamoğlu in Berlin last June.
İmamoğlu’s main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) has called the detention of the mayor “a coup attempt against our next president” intended to sideline the most powerful political rival of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
Germany is one of the countries that condemned İmamoğlu’s arrest and said it was following developments with “great concern.”
“The arrest and suspension of the mayor of Istanbul is totally unacceptable. This must be clarified very quickly and transparently,” Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s spokesman Steffen Hebestreit told a press conference on Monday.
When German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier paid a three-day visit to Turkey last April, İmamoğlu was one of the political figures he met before Erdoğan.
There were comments on social media at the time that the sequence of Steinmeier’s meetings with İmamoğlu and Erdoğan show that İmamoğlu is seen as the new leader of Turkey who will succeed Erdoğan.