Newly re-elected Istanbul mayor Ekrem Imamoğlu has emerged as the main challenger to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s reign, after fending off the Turkish president’s AK party in local elections.
After clinching a comfortable victory and retaining his post in Sunday’s mayoral elections, based on the vast majority of votes counted, Imamoğlu, 53, is seen by many analysts as a potential future president.
He shares many similarities with Erdoğan: they have both led Istanbul, have family roots in the eastern Black Sea region and their political careers have been impeded by Turkey’s courts. In their youth, both were keen footballers too.
The men both have a strong ability to appeal to voters, but they diverge when it comes to their politics. Imamoğlu, an affable former businessman who is married with three children, himself has said: “Our ideas are largely opposite.”
Erdoğan entered politics with an Islamist party and has reshaped the secular state since taking the reins in 2002. In contrast, Imamoğlu is from the staunchly secularist Republican People’s party (CHP), joining in 2008 and becoming a mayor in Istanbul’s Beylikduzu district in 2014.
Imamoğlu’s success is due to his ability to broaden the social democratic CHP’s appeal to attract more conservative voters.
He proved that in 2019, delivering Erdoğan’s AK party (AKP) its biggest defeat in two decades and beating its candidate not once but twice. A court annulled his March victory that year, only for him to win by a larger margin in a re-run election in June.
The Istanbul mayor has crafted a media image and run viral social media campaigns, that both raised his profile and got on the nerves of many voters.
State media, meanwhile, has sought to portray him in a negative light. In January 2022, pro-government media were awash with surveillance camera images of him dining with the British ambassador at a fish restaurant while Istanbul battled a snowstorm. The images played into the government’s portrayal of the mayor as out-of-touch and western-backed.
His troubles were compounded by Erdoğan taking credit for many of the important projects that have modernised Istanbul over recent years.
Legal battles and a meatball meeting
Imamoğlu himself has faced judicial woes. After his 2019 win, a judge sentenced him to two and a half years in prison, imposing a political ban for insulting public officials. The appeals court is yet to rule on the case.
The conviction echoed the experience of Erdoğan, who was briefly jailed in 1999 for reciting a poem that a court ruled was an incitement to religious hatred. Last year, another court opened a case against Imamoğlu on a charge of tender rigging that carries a sentence of three to seven years. Erdoğan’s critics see the cases as an attempt to hinder him politically. Erdogan and his AKP deny this.
Despite what he describes as obstacles from Ankara, Imamoğlu said his administration has delivered services and development in Istanbul, a city of 16 million that drives Turkey’s economy.
The metropolis is a world away from the Black Sea province of Trabzon where he was born in 1970 and spent what he describes as a happy childhood amid its “lush green nature, rough sea and stone streets”.
He studied at Istanbul University and graduated in business administration in 1994 – the year Erdoğan became mayor – before going into his family’s construction business. His love of football pushed him to become an administrator with his home town team in Trabzon.
Imamoğlu recently recalled the mundane setting where he and Erdoğan first crossed paths. In the mid-1990s after Erdoğan became mayor, he visited the meatball restaurant that the young Imamoğlu was running in Istanbul’s Gungoren district.
“When he was in his first months as mayor I hosted him,” Imamoğlu said. “He ate meatballs in my restaurant. I didn’t take his money. He won’t pay that bill as long as he lives.”
Many analysts now forecast further success for Imamoğlu. “[If] this election is not cancelled by objections in some way, he will become the president in 2028,” Ozer Sencar, head of pollster Metropoll, told Reuters before the election.
With Reuters and Agence France-Presse