The chances that Ekrem Imamoglu, the popular former Social Democrat mayor of Istanbul, could challenge Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan at the polls are increasingly slim. Imamoglu, the Social Democratic opposition’s elected candidate in the next presidential election in open primary elections, has been in prison since last March and faces a dozen prosecutions. In the latest summary accepted by the courts, this Tuesday, he is asked for between 828 and 2,352 years in prison for corruption charges.
The summary prepared by the Prosecutor’s Office, of 3,900 pages, reports 407 people, of which 105 are in precautionary custody. Imamoglu is accused of “establishing a criminal organization for personal gain” that began when he was mayor of one of Istanbul’s neighborhoods and which he expanded when he was elected Istanbul Metropolitan Mayor in 2019, a position he renewed with broad support in 2024 and held until his deposition by the courts following his arrest last March.
Since the Prosecutor’s Office believes that Imamoglu is the leader of the alleged criminal organization, it also accuses him of all the crimes committed by its alleged members: for example, 70 cases of manipulation of public tenders, 47 cases of corruption, seven of money laundering, four of fraud… and hence the heavy sentence requested for him. The list of crimes he is accused of is very long and includes everything from violating mining laws to pollution to selling citizens’ private data.
“The summary is nothing more than a series of lies connected one after another,” Imamoglu denounced from prison, accusing the Prosecutor’s Office of “coercing” many detainees and “holding them (arrested) hostage” to force them to testify against him. His aides also drew attention to the fact that the prosecutor’s summary uses descriptions that President Erdogan had already used in his attacks on Imamoglu, such as comparing the branches of the alleged plot to the “arms of an octopus”.
His party, the People’s Republican Party (CHP), has denounced that many of the accusations are based on secret witnesses and that there are numerous inconsistencies in their testimonies. “Since 2019, Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality has been the subject of more than 1,000 inspections without any evidence of systematic corruption being found,” the party recalls in a statement. For this reason they believe that this accusation is political and has the aim of neutralizing a political rival who polls show the possibility of defeating Erdogan at the polls.
Not in vain, on the eve of his arrest, on March 19, Istanbul University canceled Imamoglu’s degree, citing irregularities, which make it impossible for the Social Democratic politician to run in the presidential elections, since the law requires the head of state and government to have a university degree.
But he also has to face 11 legal proceedings, from those still under investigation (including one for terrorism and another for espionage) to those awaiting appeal, such as the one that sentenced him to two years and seven months of imprisonment and an equal number of disqualifications for having defined a member of the electoral council as “insane” and the one that sentenced him to one year and eight months of imprisonment and political interdiction for “threats and insults” to the provincial head of the Istanbul Prosecutor’s Office, Akin Gürlek, the very person responsible for the new synthesis that asks for more than two millennia of prison for Imamoglu.
