An image of jailed Istanbul Ekrem Imamoglu (C) and other detained municipal employees are displayed during Turkey’s opposition opposition party, Republican People’s Party (CHP) extraordinary congress, in Ankara, on September 21, 2025. (Photo by Adem ALTAN / AFP)

Turkish opposition leaders say the government has found a new way to silence dissent: pressuring its mayors and local officials to defect to the ruling party.

Turkey’s main opposition, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), is currently battling a series of what observers say are politically motivated lawsuits and arrests targeting its mayors and leadership.

The crackdown began after the CHP won a major victory over President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) in the March 2024 local elections.

Along with the lawsuits, there has been a growing number of defections to the AKP, with nearly 60 mayors from the main opposition switching allegiance to the ruling party over the past 18 months.

The highest-profile defection was in August, when Özlem Çerçioğlu, the CHP mayor of southwestern Aydın province, joined the AKP, along with another five district mayors in a move announced by Erdoğan himself.

The CHP says it is part of a broader campaign of intimidation that began a year ago and has seen at least 11 of its 26 mayors in İstanbul province arrested over alleged “terrorism ties” or “corruption,” among them İstanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, the CHP’s presidential candidate and the only politician believed capable of beating Erdoğan at the ballot box.

His arrest in March triggered Turkey’s worst street protests since 2013.

“Join the AKP or you’ll go to prison — that’s the message,” said CHP leader Özgür Özel in August. His words were echoed by Hasan Mutlu, mayor of Istanbul’s Bayrampaşa district, who was arrested in mid-September on corruption allegations.

“The only reason for my arrest and removal from office is my refusal to give in to pressure to join the AKP,” he wrote on X.

‘Force to resign’

“Mayors know that you don’t need to have committed a crime to be jailed in Turkey,” said CHP Vice Chair Murat Bakan.

“They force people to falsely testify [against the accused mayors]. Some stronger mayors, who don’t back down easily, resist. But others, out of fear, agree to switch rather than end up in prison,” he said.

“The AKP’s main motivation is to maintain its grip on power and deprive us of opportunities in local governance, which they believe brings us voter support. They want to take over as many city halls as possible.”

Such a strategy was used after the 2019 local elections, when more than 50 mayors from the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), now the Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party), were removed and replaced by state-appointed AKP trustees for alleged Kurdish militant ties.

CHP officials were also under pressure to change the makeup of local city councils, notably where the party held a narrow majority.

Sitki Keskin, a city council member in the Çukurova district of the southern city of Adana whose mayor was jailed in July, said AKP officials were exerting heavy pressure at council meetings.

“In some areas where mayors have been arrested, city council members have been forced to resign and cede their majority to the AKP, letting them decide who’s appointed acting mayor,” he told AFP, saying the Adana city council had managed to resist such pressure.

‘Resorting to repression’

Political scientist Sinem Adar of the Berlin-based Centre for Applied Turkey Studies said the aim was “to neutralize the opposition.”

“With these defections, the AKP is also trying to give the impression that the party is still popular, since these mayors are leaving the CHP to join it. But the AKP’s popularity has been steadily declining since 2015,” she told AFP.

Last month Erdoğan said those who had switched “believe the AKP is the ideal party to serve the nation,” expressing confidence there would be “more defections.”

But the CHP’s Bakan said the strategy was “not working. Our resistance is consolidating the whole opposition.”

Adar said the “war on several fronts” against the opposition was unlikely to end soon.

“The AKP has reached the limits of its capacity for political reform, so now it’s resorting to repression. If free elections were to take place, the AKP would have very little chance of winning,” she said.

“As long as the CHP continues to resist, this confrontation is likely to become even more complicated.”

© Agence France-Presse