İstanbul’s Bayrampaşa district came under the control of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) after the party’s candidate won a repeat city council vote on Sunday, following the arrest of the district’s opposition mayor last month, the Anka news agency reported.
The AKP’s İbrahim Akın was elected acting mayor after a tense second round of voting in the Bayrampaşa City Council. The vote followed a court decision to annul the previous election, which had been won by the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP).
Hasan Mutlu, the elected CHP mayor of Bayrampaşa, was arrested in September as part of a broader wave of corruption investigations and detentions targeting CHP-run municipalities that began a year ago.
He was subsequently suspended from office, prompting the council to hold a vote to appoint an acting mayor.
The first election, held on September 21, resulted in a draw, with both CHP and AKP candidates failing to secure a majority after four rounds of voting. A lot was then drawn and the CHP’s İbrahim Kahraman was declared the winner. However, the AKP challenged the result in court, which led to the annulment of the vote and a repeat election on Sunday.
In the renewed vote the CHP nominated Recep Öztürk, while the AKP again put forward Akın. The first rounds were marked by tension after two votes for the AKP candidate were declared invalid, prompting an argument that required security intervention.
Neither candidate secured the necessary majority in the first three rounds. In the fourth Akın received 19 votes to Öztürk’s 18, giving the AKP control of the Bayrampaşa municipality.
Following the result, Akın said, “As of tomorrow morning, we are bringing AKP municipal governance back to Bayrampaşa, which has been deprived of proper service for 18 months.”
The shift means that Bayrampaşa, where the CHP won 46.7 percent of the vote in the March 2024 local elections, is now under AKP control.
Mutlu: A blow to Bayrampaşa’s will
From jail, Mutlu reacted sharply to the outcome, describing it as a political intervention against the will of Bayrampaşa residents.
“Bayrampaşa’s will has been openly usurped,” he said in a message shared by his lawyers on X. “My colleagues and I were unlawfully imprisoned because we refused to bow to slander and rejected pressure to join the AKP. Despite all this, we won the election for acting mayor on September 21, 2025. But today’s unlawful repeat vote disregards the will of the people and amounts to a political coup against our municipality.”
The controversy in Bayrampaşa comes amid mounting government pressure on the CHP since last October.
More than 10 CHP mayors and 500 people linked to the party or the İstanbul Municipality have been detained or arrested since last year’s local elections.
The party and its supporters say the operations targeting the CHP are designed to neutralize elected officials and sideline opposition leaders after the party’s gains in the local elections.
Rights groups have raised an alarm over the series of arrests, saying they further undermine democratic opposition in Turkey ahead of future national elections.
