Ekrem İmamoğlu on Trial, How Erdoğan Jailed the Elected Mayor of Istanbul and Broke the Opposition
On 14 October 2026 Ekrem İmamoğlu stood up in a courtroom inside the Silivri prison complex, west of Istanbul, and began a four-day defence. He had been in that prison since 23 March 2025. He was elected mayor of Istanbul three times, in March 2019, again in June 2019 after the government had the first result annulled, and again in March 2024 with a bigger margin. He's the politician polls have most often shown beating Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Prosecutors want him jailed for somewhere between 828 and 2,352 years.
The case is the biggest political trial in modern Turkey. It names 436 defendants from the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality and its companies, 53 of them in custody, on charges of bribery, bid-rigging, money laundering and running a criminal organisation. İmamoğlu denies all of it and calls the case what the European Parliament, many European governments and Turkey's own opposition call it: an operation to remove the one man who could beat Erdoğan at the ballot box.
Photo: Hilmi Hacaloğlu, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Four days in March 2025
The sequence speaks for itself. On 18 March 2025 Istanbul University announced it had annulled İmamoğlu's degree, more than thirty years after he graduated, citing irregularities in a 1990 transfer from a university in northern Cyprus. A Turkish president must hold a university degree. The next morning, 19 March, police raided his home and detained him, along with about a hundred others. On 23 March a court jailed him pending trial. The same day, his party, the Republican People's Party (CHP), went ahead with a primary that made him its presidential candidate, and organisers said more than 15 million people voted in it, most of them not party members.
Turkey then saw its largest street protests in more than a decade. Police detained nearly 2,000 people, students and journalists among them, including an AFP photographer covering the crowds. The governor of Istanbul banned demonstrations; a court later annulled the ban. Since October 2025 courts have acquitted hundreds of the protesters, 88 more on 12 October 2026, which tells you how thin the cases were.
The cases pile up
The corruption trial opened on 9 March 2026. By then İmamoğlu had already been sentenced in July 2025 for insulting and threatening Istanbul's chief prosecutor, a separate "political espionage" case had been opened against him, and in January 2026 a court rejected his challenge to the diploma annulment, which, unless overturned on appeal, keeps him off the ballot for the presidential election due in 2028. In October 2026 prosecutors opened yet another investigation, over what he said about the investigators in his own defence.
His defence has turned the accusation round. He told the court that under AKP-run administrations between 2009 and 2019, developers gained about 85 billion dollars from public land and extra building rights, and that 2,278 parcels were given expanded development rights in that decade against 69 since he took office. He says he was jailed for getting in the way of that system, including the housing push along the route of Canal Istanbul.
The party taken apart
The government's lawyers didn't stop with the mayor. Dozens of CHP mayors across the country, several of them from Istanbul districts, have been arrested since 2025. In May 2026 an appeals court in Ankara ruled that the 2023 CHP congress that had elected Özgür Özel as leader was void, removed him, and handed the party back to his predecessor, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, whom the party's own delegates had voted out in 2023. Police enforced the eviction of Özel's team from the party headquarters on 24 May.
Özel answered by founding a new party, the New Party, on 24 July 2026. Ninety-one MPs followed him, and İmamoğlu declared his full support from prison. The country's main opposition now sits in a party that is three months old, while the brand that Atatürk founded is run by a court-appointed leadership.
What it says about Turkey
Erdoğan has been in power since 2003. In that time he has turned a parliamentary republic into a presidential system built around himself, through the 2017 referendum; purged more than a hundred thousand public servants after the failed coup of July 2016; jailed journalists, Kurdish politicians and civil-society figures such as Osman Kavala; and run the economy into one of the worst inflation crises of any major country. Elections remained the one check he couldn't fully control. Istanbul in 2019 proved he could lose them.
The İmamoğlu case is the answer to that problem. It doesn't need a conviction to work. It needs the leading challenger to stay in Silivri, his degree to stay void, and his party to stay split until 2028.
The next hearing is set for 2 November.