Twenty elected mayors from Turkey’s main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) remain in prison two years after the March 31, 2024, local elections, while 25 CHP mayors, including İstanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, have been suspended from office, Turkish Minute reported, citing the BirGün news website.
According to the report, 23 elected CHP mayors have been jailed since the local elections, with the most recent being Onursal Adıgüzel, mayor of İstanbul’s Ataşehir district, who was arrested on bribery charges on Wednesday and later suspended by the Interior Ministry. Of those 23, three were later released.
The March 2024 municipal elections were a major breakthrough for the CHP, which finished first nationwide in a local election for the first time since 1977 and won control of many of Turkey’s biggest cities, including İstanbul, Ankara, Bursa, Antalya and Adana. Since then opposition officials have said the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) government has used criminal investigations, suspensions, trustee appointments, city council votes and party defections to weaken the party’s hold over local administrations.
In total, 25 CHP mayors have been suspended from office. Two of them, Mustafa Sarıgül, mayor of eastern Tunceli province’s Ovacık district, and Ali Demirçalı, mayor of southern Adana province’s Yüreğir district, were suspended without being jailed after receiving prison sentences in separate cases. Several mayors who were later released, including Ahmet Özer, mayor of İstanbul’s Esenyurt district, Adana Mayor Zeydan Karalar and Kadir Aydar, mayor of Adana’s Ceyhan district, have not been reinstated.
Three municipalities won by the CHP in 2024 — İstanbul’s Şişli and Esenyurt districts and Tunceli’s Ovacık district — are now under trustee rule. In four others — the Bursa Metropolitan Municipality and İstanbul’s Bayrampaşa, Gaziosmanpaşan and Beykoz districts — control shifted to the AKP through city council votes or party defections after CHP mayors were suspended. The report also said Özlem Çerçioğlu, mayor of Aydın in western Turkey, later joined the AKP, further reducing the CHP’s local gains.
The campaign first hit İstanbul, where the arrest of Esenyurt Mayor Ahmet Özer in October 2024 was followed by cases against mayors in Beşiktaş, Beykoz and Şişli. It escalated on March 23, 2025, when a court jailed İmamoğlu, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s main political rival and the CHP’s presidential candidate, after his detention triggered the country’s largest anti-government protests in years.
Operations later spread to other CHP-run cities and districts. Bursa Mayor Mustafa Bozbey, the mayor of Turkey’s fourth-largest city, was jailed on April 4 in a corruption investigation and suspended the same day. Özkan Yalım, the mayor of Uşak, was also jailed and removed from office last month, while Tanju Özcan, the mayor of Bolu in the northwest, was suspended after his March arrest. Yılmaz Tozan, mayor of Uşak’s Eşme district, was suspended this week after being jailed in an extortion investigation.
The Uşak case expanded this week in a second wave of the same investigation, with 16 more people, including local CHP chairman Celalettin Çoban and Uşakspor football club president Özhan Özgöbek, jailed on Thursday after prosecutors detained 29 suspects over additional bribery and corruption allegations tied to the municipality.
