 leader Özgür Özel has said.){kind=link}
Mansur Yavaş, mayor of the Turkish capital of Ankara, is viewed as the strongest opposition candidate for president if İstanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, who is currently in pretrial detention and faces multiple investigations, is unable to run, main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) leader Özgür Özel has said.
Özel told the Evrensel daily in an interview that Yavaş is currently polling ahead of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and is therefore being targeted by politically motivated investigations.
“The entire purpose of this operation is to harm Mansur Yavaş and the CHP,” he said, referring to investigations into staff at the Ankara Municipality.
In the latest wave of an ongoing crackdown on CHP municipalities, 13 people, including current and former officials of the Ankara Municipality, were detained on Tuesday in a corruption investigation into spending on concerts organized by the municipality.
The Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office claimed that 32 cultural events held between 2021 and 2024 caused a loss to the city of about 154 million lira ($3.7 million).
The municipality criticized the raids and insisted that the municipality’s accounts were regularly reviewed by the Court of Accounts without any irregularities being found.
Ankara Mayor Yavaş, who was re-elected in March 2024 with more than 60 percent of the vote, called the operation politically motivated.
In the interview Özel added that İmamoğlu’s repeated victories over Erdoğa was the reason for the criminal cases against him. “Since İmamoğlu was jailed for the crime of defeating Erdoğan three times in a row, and because he intends to do so again, it’s clear that Yavaş is now in the government’s crosshairs for the same reason,” Özel said.
İmamoğlu was detained on March 19 and later arrested on corruption charges criticized as politically motivated. His arrest, widely seen as targeting the biggest political rival to longtime President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in the 2028 presidential election, sparked Turkey’s worst protests in decades.
İmamoğlu won İstanbul’s mayoral race in 2019 and defeated Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) again after the results of the first election were cancelled on the grounds of irregularities. He was named his party’s presidential candidate in March for the next general election scheduled for 2028. But his political future has been clouded by court cases and legal rulings that could bar him from politics and that his party and supporters say are designed to sideline him.
Yavaş, a former member of the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) who joined the CHP in 2013, was elected mayor of Ankara in 2019, defeating the AKP candidate in a major upset. He is widely considered a pragmatic and moderate figure within the opposition.
More than 500 people linked to the CHP or the İstanbul Municipality have been detained or arrested since last year’s local elections when the CHP emerged as the most successful party and the AKP suffered its worst election defeat.