ISTANBUL: Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, a key figure and possible future leader of Turkiye’s political opposition, said on Tuesday he is set to run again for mayor in local elections set for March.
“As I have said many times: Who wins in Istanbul also wins in Turkiye. Success in Istanbul would take one to very important spots in national politics,” Imamoglu, who runs the country’s largest city, told reporters.
Imamoglu was not picked as the opposition leader in May national elections but is seen as one of its best hopes to unseat President Tayyip Erdogan in the years ahead. He has called for a “total change” in the opposition since Erdogan defeated its candidate, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, on May 28.
Kilicdaroglu has remained chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party, or CHP, despite growing calls to resign, and has not said whether he will stand as a candidate in the party congress this autumn.
Some analysts see Imamoglu as a possible successor.
“Today I’m setting out to defend Istanbul again, I’m setting out for the grand Istanbul alliance again,” Imamoglu said.
CHP cooperated with the center-nationalist IYI Party and pro-Kurdish HDP in 2019 municipal elections to secure Imamoglu’s victory in Istanbul, which came as a shock to Erdogan and his ruling AK Party.
Also on Tuesday, Turkish investigative journalist Baris Pehlivan, who was ordered to return to prison by text message this month, was jailed for the fifth time in three years.
The Justice Ministry informed him on Aug. 2 via an SMS message that he had to surrender himself by Aug. 15 to the prison in Silivi on the outskirts of Istanbul, where many of the government critics are held.
Pehlivan’s latest book, “SS,” accuses former Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu of having links to organized crime. “Baris might be released on parole,” his lawyer Huseyin Ersoz told AFP. “A decision could be made at any time,” he said.
A former editor-in-chief at Oda TV and contributor to daily newspaper Cumhuriyet, Pehlivan has already been imprisoned four times.
Two of those incidents involved him spending a day behind bars — once in February and once in May
Pehlivan and six other journalists were sentenced to three years and nine months in prison in 2020 for reporting the funeral of a member of Turkiye’s MIT secret services who was operating in Libya, where Ankara supports the UN-recognized Tripoli government.
While his death has never been denied by the Turkish authorities, the reporters were charged with revealing “state secrets.”
Pehlivan was recalled this time to serve eight months of the 2020 sentence for violating the country’s national intelligence laws.
