"Through the back door": The AKP found the key to Izmir
What is the value of a ballot in modern Turkey? Exactly the value that the presidential palace in Ankara is prepared to assign to it.
If citizens vote "the wrong way," if a megalopolis of millions has rejected the clerical regime for decades, it is not political arguments that are brought to bear, but police batons, court sentences, and outright, undisguised criminal blackmail.
What happened on October 7 in Ankara will go down in the history of Turkish politics as the moment of the complete and final dismantling of the institution of elections. The mayor of Izmir, Cemil Tugay, who back in March 2024 was triumphantly elected by the city's residents from the opposition Republican People's Party (CHP), stood on stage with a smile and received a party badge from the hands of Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The man for whom, despite insane administrative pressure, 49% of the city's residents voted, surrendered. The ruling party, which in a quarter of a century was never able to win a free and fair contest for Izmir, simply took it for itself through the back door.
Izmir has always been the main stronghold of secular, social-democratic, and Kemalist Turkey. In the 2024 municipal elections, international observers recorded a monolithic rejection of the AKP's Islamist course in the west of the country: the CHP not only took the post of mayor of Izmir with 49% against 37% for the presidential candidate, it routed the ruling bloc in 28 of the province's 30 districts. People went to the polling stations and voted for a secular future. But in the political reality of today's Ankara, the will of millions is not worth even the paper the ballot is printed on.
For Erdogan, democracy has finally turned into that very tram from his early speeches, which one gets off as soon as the desired stop has been reached. If power cannot be obtained by democratic means, it is simply seized.
The raider takeover scheme: Blackmail, prison, and the "judicial noose"
The story of Tugay's "migration" from the opposition to the camp of power is a ready-made indictment against the Turkish law enforcement system, which has turned into a branch of the punitive organ of the Justice and Development Party.
In June, Tugay left the CHP after a biased court annulled the results of the 2023 party congress and stripped Ozgur Ozel of the chairmanship. When Ozel, together with 90 deputies, announced the creation of the "New Party," Tugay refused to join his colleagues and remained independent. But the status of "independent" in modern Turkey is only a temporary pause before men in uniform come for you.
The secret of this unexpected "change of convictions" is revealed quite simply. Even before the October performance, Ozgur Ozel directly accused the AKP of having forced Tugay to change his political colors through blackmail and direct threats of imprisonment. The mechanism has been honed to automatism: against any opposition city head, archives are instantly raised or fabricated, cases are opened under corruption articles, and then he is presented with a choice — either arrest and a prison bunk, or capitulation and an AKP party badge.
Later, Ozel revealed the inside story of this "recruitment": "He told us and many of our friends: 'Will you go with me? Or should we go to prison? I cannot go to prison. I have chosen my path'"
There it is, the entire "voluntariness" of the transition. A man is simply confronted with a harsh alternative: dungeons or betrayal of the voters. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, at the ceremonial event in Ankara, naturally called these accusations "slander and conjecture." But whom is the regime trying to deceive?
Tugay's story is not an isolated case, but a systemic conveyor belt put into mass production. The mayor of Izmir became already the second head of a major megalopolis to perform such a "somersault": earlier, by exactly the same scheme, the head of Aydin, Ozlem Cercioglu, was forced to move from the CHP to the AKP.
And for those who show courage and refuse to betray their voters, Turkish justice has another scenario in store. Dozens of opposition mayors are right now sitting in prison cells on corruption cases that the opposition calls fabricated. Among them are the mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoglu, and Tugay's predecessor as head of Izmir, Tunc Soyer. The political purge is proceeding on all fronts. At the end of July, the mayor of Istanbul's Uskudar district, Sinem Dedetas, was put behind bars on corruption charges — exactly after rumors of her intention to join Ozel's party leaked into the press.
At that same time, at the end of July, Ozel, in an interview with the outlet Medyascope, spoke frankly about the sophisticated methods of "recruitment," stating that a former AKP deputy directly threatened one of the "Yeni Parti" mayors with a prison term, demanding in ultimatum form that he move under Erdogan's banners.
This is not politics. This is state-political racketeering, in which the role of the extortionist is played by the ruling elite itself.
Analysis of the elections: Why the AKP is in a panic-stricken fear of the people
To understand why Ankara has shifted to methods of forcible expropriation of municipal power, it is enough to look at the figures and the electoral map of the last elections.
In the 2024 elections, the Justice and Development Party suffered the most crushing defeat in its history. Electoral analysis shows a profound transformation of Turkish society:
- Loss of the megalopolises: The AKP resoundingly lost Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, Bursa, Adana, Antalya. Voting against Erdogan was not simply the "secular activist base," but the entire working class and the middle class of big business, suffocating from insane inflation and the ruin of the economy.
- The youth boom: Young people, who came to the polling stations for the first time, massively rejected Islamist rhetoric. In Izmir and Istanbul, the percentage of those voting for the CHP among people aged 18 to 30 exceeded 60%.
- The geography of protest: Even traditionally conservative Anatolian provinces began to turn away from the AKP.
Seeing that demographic and economic trends make an AKP victory in honest elections impossible, the regime drew the only conclusion possible for itself, namely that if the people vote against you, the very institution of elective office must be destroyed.
Why conduct complex campaigns, spend billions on propaganda, and try to court Izmir's voters, if you can simply arrest the opposition leader, intimidate his successor, and take a city of millions with a single stroke of the pen?
A parody of "law" and a political counterfeiter
Today the Turkish judicial system has turned into a laughingstock. The whole country is watching a farce called "the CHP congress case," in which the prosecutor's office, at a snap of the fingers from the presidential palace, stamps out the required rulings.
The paradox and the full cynicism of the regime were vividly manifested at the court session in the CHP congress case, about which the outlet Medyascope reported in detail, where the prosecutor demanded an actual prison sentence for the detained mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoglu, but at the same time requested a full acquittal and a verdict of not guilty for… Cemil Tugay!
No sooner had Tugay received his AKP party card than all his "transgressions," "cooperative violations," and "corruption suspicions," with which he had been blackmailed for months, instantly evaporated from the prosecutor's office files. Yesterday's "suspect" was in the blink of an eye transformed into a "crystal-clear citizen."
The reaction of opposition leader Ozgur Ozel to this shameful act of handing over the city was merciless and precise. Assessing Tugay's actions and the roles assigned to him by Ankara, Ozel summed up: "Cemil is a traitor to us, and a puppet to them."
Ozel did not stop there and revealed what Ankara plans to turn Izmir's leadership into: "I think they will install a strong secretary general, and they will keep Cemil in a symbolic place. Cemil Tugay will be a puppet chairman, like a child at the April 23 celebration (in Turkey, National Sovereignty and Children's Day – ed.)"
And he added the main, harshest diagnosis of the Turkish political reality: "They took this coward, but they will not be able to take Izmir."
A harsh diagnosis
What is happening in Turkey today is not "complex domestic politics" and not ordinary "party struggle." It is a systematic, cold-blooded, and criminal seizure of power by a group of individuals who have lost the electoral support of their own people.
Democracy in Turkey is effectively dead, and elections have been definitively turned into a stage set whose results are annulled either by direct arrests of the winners or by their forcible re-recruitment. The judicial system has been completely trampled: the prosecutor's office and the courts act as punitive squads, absolving people of responsibility for betrayal and sending them to prison for fidelity to principles. Local government bodies have been annulled, for cities are no longer run by elected representatives of the people — they are run by puppets appointed from Ankara and by security-service handlers.
Having appropriated Izmir through nighttime threats and judicial machinations, the authorities have won an obvious Pyrrhic victory. One can intimidate a single specific official, one can force him to smile at a photo session in Ankara, holding onto an AKP badge. But one cannot force millions of residents of Izmir, Istanbul, and Aydin to love a regime that openly steals their votes.
In light of this, everyone dealing with Turkey of the 2026 model should clearly understand whom they are dealing with. Talk of a "democratic Turkey" is from now on the province of naive or biased advocates of the regime. In the ruling party, a rigid, cynical authoritarian system has taken hold, one that, for the sake of preserving its own control over resources, is prepared to trample the Constitution, crush the courts, and turn the country into political ashes.
Farhad Huseyn
