Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu warned Wednesday that Turkish authorities will continue to increase pressure on him and his municipal administration after his sentence of two years and seven months in prison for insulting members of the Supreme Electoral Council was confirmed a few days ago.
Imamoglu, of the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), expects that in the coming weeks and months new «politically motivated» investigations will be opened with a view to damaging him and his party in the June 2023 elections under the accusation of alleged terrorist links among his staff.
Thus, the mayor of Istanbul has detailed that currently the Prosecutor’s Office has more than 1,650 names under suspicion and has accused the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, of preparing a whole plot to oust him and thus recover, almost three years later, a city that was more than two decades under his control.
«They can do anything… We know they will stop at nothing in the next three, four or five months,» warned Imamoglu, the main representative of the secular opposition and Erdogan’s potential rival in the 2023 elections.
Two weeks ago, he was disqualified and sentenced to two years and seven months in prison for allegedly insulting members of the Higher Election Board (YSK) in 2019, when he canceled the first round of local elections, which he won again with an even bigger margin when they were rerun later that year.
Several rights and civil society organizations have questioned the judicial process against Mayor Imamoglu and the persecution against him allegedly initiated by the Erdogan government for fear that he would emerge as a major rival in a context also of economic and political crisis that makes the 2023 appointment the most important electoral contest in the last 20 years Imamoglu is not the only local authority that has seen the courts remove him from office. In recent years, several Kurdish mayors of localities in the southeast of the country have been removed from office for alleged links with terrorist groups.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
