I’ve been resisting the idea of writing a comparison between imprisoned Istanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu and likely future New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani. I don’t want to be that guy who’s reading Turkish politics into everything that happens out in the world.
And yet, here I am. I think it’s worth thinking about this.
It’s not just that there are strong echoes between the candidates — there obviously are — but that what happened in Turkish politics over the last couple of decades actually has very real lessons for what’s happening in the United States.
Because ultimately, nobody cares if life in Istanbul or New York is a bit better. People aren’t getting this excited about these elections because they want to ride the bus for free. They’re getting excited because they see in figures like İmamoğlu or Mamdani a new type of politics that could take on the guy at the top: your Erdoğans and Trumps, the people who actually forge the future for us and our children.
It’s very important to keep one’s focus on that, and it’s here where the Turkish example can be instructive.
But let me back up for a second. What’s so similar about İmamoğlu and Mamdani?
There’s a structural comparison to be made, as well as a more personal comparison.
Let’s think through the structural dimension first.
If the reactionary right-wing president is a figure of our times, the left-liberal big city mayor is his shadow. Budapest elected a green-left mayor against Victor Orbán’s man. São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro elected leftist mayors during Bolsenaro’s presidency in Brazil. In Israel, big city mayors have been pushing back against Netanyahu’s far-right government. And of course in Turkey, the CHP took over the country’s two biggest cities in 2019, and in 2024, took nearly all of the big cities.
What explains this pattern? I won’t belabor a detailed explanation here, except to gesture towards neoliberal economics since the 1980s, as well as the growing urban-rural divide. Provincial life tends to be conservative-cum-reactionary, metropolitan life tends to be liberal-cum-progressive. The right has cohered better across the world for various reasons, and has taken hold over the state. The left-liberal resistance has fallen back to the cities.
This means that Mamdani and İmamoğlu are members of the same global political class. But are they personally similar?
Yes. Both are unusually talented retail politicians, spending a lot of time on the streets. Despite a significant age gap, both have youthful energy. Both waged doggedly positive campaigns, designed to set themselves apart from the divisive rhetoric on the national stage. İmamoğlu’s team called it “radical love.” Mamdani has emphasized terms like “dignity,” reaching back to the socialist tradition.¹ Both campaign on bread-and-butter issues, and both promise to provide services for the poorest groups in their cities. Both get attacked with culture war issues.
Most significantly, both are going to face a presidentially orchestrated campaign of lawfare. This is where the Turkey example is crucial.
Because again, we don’t follow these figures because we want city life to be a bit better. That’s actually a bit of a trap. If these mayors were just about delivering services, the right might even support them. Instead, the job of the big city mayor is to build up a resistance to right-wing power in the presidency and eventually launch a presidential campaign. The progression is something like this:
- Win the big central city and deliver on most of your promises. This should make people feel that you’re different from everyone else.
- Build a base of support in the media, high culture, business, and municipal bureaucracy. Make it difficult for the president to attack you.
- Break through the resistance in your own party, eventually taking it over, restructure it to enable it to win
- Launch a presidential campaign (or support an ally who launches theirs)
İmamoğlu made his way to #3, and it wasn’t easy. He had to get foreign financing to deliver on his subway construction. He had to convince people (especially in business) that he could win, and that an investment in him was worth the risk. Most difficult of all, he had to fight tooth and nail in the CHP, his own party. That’s where he got stuck. He got boxed in ahead of the 2023 election and wasn’t allowed to run against Erdoğan. Many think that he would have won. His chances would certainly have been very good.
So İmamoğlu had to postpone his run. In 2024, he finally successed in #3: his allies in the CHP kicked out the party leader, and elected a fresh face. They were now preparing for 2028.
And that’s where Erdoğan stepped in. His people arrested İmamoğlu and are currently burying him under a growing pile of unfounded accusations. It’s unlikely he’ll get out anytime soon.
The problem is time. As the left-progressive mayor is racing to build his base, the far-right president is building hegemony across the entire state. Erdoğan had complete hegemony across the system. He controls the judiciary top to bottom, and though his media ecosystem isn’t perfect, it can manufacture some consent over time. This means he can lock up anyone he wants. Yes, it hurts his legitimacy a bit, and he’s doing a lot of pre and post-facto rationalization to minimize that, but he can do it without fatal blowback.
I don’t know how this is going to play out in the United States. Obviously, it’s a very different kind of political and institutional topography. Istanbul is much bigger than New York, relative to the two countries.
The basic political dynamic though, is very similar.
So to be clear, I’m not suggesting that Mamdani should run for president in 2028 — he’s not a natural-born citizen anyways, so can’t. I think it’d be more useful to think of anti-establishment Democrats like him (on the left and right) and consider them collectively in the “İmamoğlu” category. New York City, as an area of contestation with Trump, is obviously going to be very important for this group.
It’s these new Democrats who will have to build a base of support, challenge the old guard in the Democratic party, and launch an extremely competitive presidential campaign in 2028, while all the while, having strong legal and PR defenses.
They have to remember that municipal power in itself is a dead end. Even state government or Congressional majorities won’t cut it. They have to re-take the White House before time is up. That’s the challenge.