ANKARA
\nThe mayor of Izmir, Turkiye\u2019s third-largest city and a bastion of its secular opposition, joined President Tayyip Erdogan\u2019s ruling AK Party (AKP) on Wednesday, amid a crackdown on the opposition in which dozens of mayors have been jailed.
\nCemil Tugay, elected mayor in 2024 as a candidate of the opposition Republican People\u2019s Party (CHP) before quitting in June, formally joined the AKP at a ceremony in Ankara, handing Erdogan\u2019s party the mayoralty of a city it has never managed to win at the ballot box.
\n\u201cI have no doubt that, with harmony between the local administration and central government, we will \u200cachieve great things,\u201d Tugay \u200csaid. The move is a significant symbolic gain for Erdogan\u2019s party in \u200cthe western coastal city, long regarded as the heartland of Turkiye\u2019s secular, social democratic opposition.
\nThe religiously and socially conservative AKP, founded by Erdogan in 2001, has never won the Izmir metropolitan municipality despite dominating national politics for more than two decades. Tugay won the March 2024 election with 49 percent of the vote, against 37 percent for the AKP candidate.
\nThe CHP also won 28 of Izmir\u2019s 30 district municipalities. Many mayors are in jail awaiting trial Erdogan\u2019s AKP suffered a major electoral blow in the March 2024 mayoral elections but since then Turkish authorities have launched an unprecedented crackdown on \u200copposition municipalities that saw many mayors targeted with corruption \u200ccharges that critics say are unfounded.
\nDozens of mayors, including Istanbul\u2019s Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, who is seen as Erdogan\u2019s \u200cmain rival, are in jail pending trial. Tunc Soyer, who was the Izmir mayor \u200cbefore Tugay, is also among those jailed as part of a corruption probe. The opposition has rejected the corruption accusations and says the investigations are politically motivated. The government says the judiciary is independent.
\nTugay resigned from the CHP in June after a court ruling that annulled the CHP 2023 congress and stripped \u200cOzgur Ozel of his title as CHP chairman. However, he did not join the New Party founded by Ozel and 90 opposition MPs in protest over the court ruling and continued as an independent mayor.
\nOzel accused the AKP on Tuesday of using blackmail and the threat of imprisonment to pressure Tugay into defecting. \u201cThose who refuse to bow to this pressure \u2026 and do not betray their friends or their party will remain our brothers until the day we die. Those who sell out and leave are genuine traitors,\u201d Ozel told his party\u2019s parliamentary group. Erdogan rejected such accusations at Wednesday\u2019s ceremony. \u201cThose who want to serve their cities in peace see the AK Party as the safest address,\u201d Erdogan said.
\n\u201cThis is the reason for the growing support for the AK Party. Any suggestion otherwise is slander and speculation.\u201d Tugay is the second mayor of a large city to defect to the AKP from the CHP, after Ozlem Cercioglu, mayor of Aydin, another western coastal city. Dozens of district mayors elected from opposition parties in 2024 have also joined the AKP since then.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
ANKARA The mayor of Izmir, Turkiye\u2019s third-largest city and a bastion of its secular opposition, joined President Tayyip Erdogan\u2019s ruling AK Party (AKP) on Wednesday, amid a crackdown on the opposition in which dozens of mayors have been jailed. Cemil Tugay, elected mayor in 2024 as a candidate of the opposition Republican People\u2019s Party (CHP) …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":104078,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-104064","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104064","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104064"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104064\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":104086,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104064\/revisions\/104086"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/104078"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}