In March 2025, Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu sent the following message from his cell to New York’s new mayor: “Congratulations Mamdani! You achieved a historic victory with the highest turnout since 1969. The power of social municipalism, inclusion, solidarity and pro-people leadership is once again proven. A new politics is possible.”
Shortly before Imamoğlu’s message, Mamdani celebrated his victory with a rousing speech aimed in part at Donald Trump. “If anyone can teach a people betrayed by Donald Trump how to defeat him, it’s the city of his birth. And if there’s a way to terrorize a tyrant, it’s by dismantling the conditions that allowed him to amass power.”
“This is how we can stop not only Mr. Trump, but the next president as well. So, Mr. Donald Trump, I know you’re watching this, so I have three words for you: Turn up the volume.”
From prison to stardom
Imamoglu knows what Mamdani is talking about. Imamoglu won victory in Istanbul in 2019 after 25 years of absolute control by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his party, the AKP, in the country’s economic engine and largest city (accounting for 30.4% of Turkey’s total GDP). In a highly questionable move, authorities ordered new elections, but instead of Mr. Erdogan regaining the mayor’s seat, Mr. İmamoğlu expanded his lead from 14,000 votes to 800,000. He won again against a presidential candidate in the 2024 local elections.
In February, Imamoglu, who has become a leading opposition figure at the national level, announced his candidacy for the 2028 presidential election (Erdogan has ruled the country with an iron fist since 2003). He has since been arrested and charged with corruption, terrorism and even espionage.
Erdoğan himself rose to power from being mayor of Istanbul. In 1999, a young mayor is jailed surrounded by his followers after being found guilty of reciting religious poetry deemed dangerous by the secular elite that has run the country for decades. “In 1999, Turkey’s political establishment imprisoned Mr. Erdoğan on trumped-up charges, creating an anti-hero. He took office as mayor but emerged as a political star. Mr. İmamoğlu’s arrest will have a similar impact on his brand, catapulting him to stardom,” analyst Sonar Cagaptay wrote at the time.
Zulf Libanelli: “I was the one who encouraged him to express himself”
A few weeks ago I spoke with Zulf Livaneri, one of Turkiye’s great intellectuals. He came to Spain, but not before passing through Silivri Prison, one of the world’s largest prisons, which has become a symbol of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s authoritarianism. So he visited Imamor. “I was the one who encouraged him to run for mayor because Istanbul is very important. If he wins in Istanbul, he will later become prime minister or president. So I persuaded him,” he told me.
When Erdoğan’s party came to power in 2002, there were around 60,000 prisoners in Turkiye. Now it’s probably over 350,000. According to the Council of Europe’s latest report, Turkiye has almost as many prisoners of war as the other 45 member states combined. Silivri was built to accommodate 11,000 people, and eventually accommodated 22,000. One of the world’s largest prisons has been converted into a 1 million square meter mini-city.
“It’s like a big concentration camp. I’ve seen other friends, like Osman Kabala (the European Court of Human Rights has twice called for his release), become a bit depressed, but Imamour is behaving like a leader. He tries to organize things and wants to give people hope. It’s a big struggle,” Livanelli told me.
Istanbul is very important, so I was the one who encouraged him to run for mayor. If you get Istanbul, you can be prime minister or president, so I convinced him.
Zulf Libanelli
Mr. Livanelli was a member of the same party as Mr. İmamoğlu, but left the party because of his nationalist tendencies. This structure, inherited from the nation’s founding father Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, is a mix of nationalism, social democracy, and advocacy of secularism.
The left-wing national leader, who is also a musician and writer, often talks with Imamour and party leaders. “I’m like their older brother. They ask me for my opinion, and I tell them they have to solve their identity problem. They have to become a social democratic party like the rest of the world.”
The writer was also arrested and imprisoned after the military coup in 1971, and upon leaving the country he realized that his songs had become protest anthems against the military. “There used to be a large left-wing movement in Turkiye, but it no longer exists,” he says. Livanelli not only made his songs a symbol of the progressive struggle, but also conveyed the poems of his “hero” García Lorca to the Turks through song. This includes “Song of the Rider,” also performed in Spain by Paco Ibáñez.
Returning to municipalism and its power, in Kurdish-majority southeastern Turkey, the Turkish government has been removing pro-Kurdish mayors for a decade to install like-minded administrators. In 2014, they won 102 mayoral elections, and the government ultimately appointed administrators to 95 of them, leaving only seven mayors with pro-Kurdish parties. This strategy was repeated in 2019, with only four out of 65 mayoral races ultimately winning. After the 2024 elections, President Erdoğan once again used his manual to clearly suspend the will of democracy.
Politics starts at the bottom and those at the top are scared.
Must read…
This is ugly, but since I’ve already recommended reading Livanelli’s latest work, On the Back of a Tiger, which is a great novel about the exile of Abdulhamid II, the last great sultan of the Ottoman Empire, here’s another Turkish reading (that’s my weakness). “You’ll feel the breath of Turkey on the back of your neck: kidnapping, espionage, and dirty war in Erdoğan’s country” which I published last year with the publisher Peninsula (there’s a donkey in front so you don’t get scared). This is the result of years of research on Turkiye, dozens of interviews, and a story straight out of a spy novel. I hope you like it. If you’ve read it, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Thank you very much for coming this far.
See you next week!
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