For the second year in a row, the agenda of Turkish pop politics has revolved around two questions: which other opposition mayors will the government imprison or co-opt, and which other famous TV series, YouTube stars, or stage performers will fall under the anti-drug campaign.

The purge of mayors began on March 19, 2025, with the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoğlu. At that time, the Istanbul mayor had become one of the most influential politicians in the country, not inferior to Erdoğan in terms of ratings. However, in the fall of 2024, the government made a “trial arrest.” Then Ahmet Özer, the mayor of Istanbul’s most populous district, Esenyurt, was thrown into prison. He became the first elected local leader from the Republican People’s Party to be removed from office.

Before this, Erdoğan's government had put considerable pressure on the opposition, but had not dared to remove elected mayors from office. The practice of arresting (removing) an elected leader was used only in the southeastern provinces, where representatives of Kurdish parties were elected as city and village mayors. Usually, they were accused of ties to terrorists, and the rest of Turkey swallowed the replacement of elected leaders with Ankara's appointees.

The Esenyurt operation became an intermediate link in scaling up previous experience: how to transfer the formula for removing Kurdish mayors to the fight against the main secular opposition. Because the mayor of the Istanbul district of Esenyurt was a Kurd who was accused of having ties to terrorists, but he was elected not from the pro-Kurdish DEM party, but from the Atatürkist CHP (Turkish: Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, the Republican People's Party - Ed.) (in fact, these were non-public agreements between the two parties about a joint candidate).

The initiative turned out to be successful. The second target was the main and most important - the mayor of Istanbul, Imamoğlu. His arrest caused millions of protests across the country, which died out by the end of the summer of 2025 due to the arrests of active protesters and the hot Turkish weather.

The authorities waited out the active phase of the protests, and then began a wave of arrests and removals of other mayors from the CHP. Over these one and a half years, the opposition lost a third of the opposition mayors in Istanbul (9 out of 25; in total, there are 39 districts in Istanbul, where the opposition won the majority of them for the first time in the last local elections). In parallel, the Turkish authorities began to get rid of the heads of large cities from the opposition. The mayors of Antalya, Adana, and finally Bursa lost their positions - these cities occupy the sixth, fifth, and fourth places in terms of population. In the city number three, Izmir, the incumbent mayor was not touched, but his predecessor, Soyer Tunç, was arrested. In addition to the arrests, opposition mayors also joined the ranks of the ruling Justice and Development Party. In 2025, the mayor of the coastal metropolis, Aydın Özlem Çerçioğlu, joined Erdoğan's party, and the other day, the head of the city of Afyonkarahisar, Burcu Köksal, took the same step. Both ladies are not new paratrooper in the CHP, who changed their party registration at the first opportunity. The new Erdoğan “carcasses” have been the faces of Atatürk’s party for over 20 years - Çerçioğlu won the mayoral elections in Aydın three times, and Köksal was a member of parliament three times.

In general, the number of mayors of various levels who have been removed or dragged to their side by the authorities is around sixty. And this indicates that the shock of losing the local elections in the spring of 2024 has passed, and Erdoğan has shown what would happen to his opponents even in the event of undesirable results for him.

The authorities are currently determining who will be the next target: the mayor of the capital Ankara, Mansur Yavaş, or the Republican People’s Party as a whole. They have been trying to blackmail Yavaş since 2019, when he first took office. So far, not a single case against him has even turned into an official indictment. However, the temptation to get rid of the Ankara mayor is great - he, like the arrested Imamoğlu, defeats Erdoğan in the second round of the presidential election.

At the same time, the authorities have launched a war against the party as a whole. The previous leader, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, lost the presidential race to Erdoğan in the spring of 2023, and within six months, he lost the leadership of his own party. In 2024, several prominent Republican People's Party members from Kılıçdaroğlu's entourage, who were expelled from the party, filed complaints about bribing delegates to the party congress, at which Özgür Özel replaced Kılıçdaroğlu as leader of the Republican People's Party. The consideration of this case is constantly postponed, and this is hanging over the current leadership of the Republican People's Party, under which the Atatürk Party became the number one political force in the country for the first time in 45 years, overtaking Erdoğan's party.

Kılıçdaroğlu himself seems to be less pleased with this success than he is saddened by his own defeat. He remained silent when the arrests of opposition mayors began. He did not say a word when the authorities removed the party leadership in Istanbul and appointed an external administration for the Istanbul branch. And just the other day, he made a lengthy video address on social media that Atatürk's party must cleanse itself of those who have tarnished it with bribes. So far, no accusations of corruption against the dismissed mayors have been confirmed in the courts, and in the Imamoğlu case, several people have already withdrawn their own testimonies against the arrested Istanbul mayor, stating that they did so under pressure from investigators and prosecutors. So, most likely, Kılıçdaroğlu is not an accidental ally of the government, but is deliberately helping Erdoğan get rid of real competitors to regain the party and continue to be a convenient opposition that has lost every election for him dozens of times.

While this material was being prepared, a court in Ankara issued a ruling in the case of the Republican People's Party. All decisions of the party congress, which took place on November 4-5, 2023, have been declared invalid, which means that the court has removed the leadership led by Özgür Özel, and Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu is returning to the party leader's chair.