Move to bring back dormant case against leading opposition figure comes months before critical local elections.
December 11, 2023, Financial Times.
Turkey’s opposition has accused Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government of mounting a political “coup attempt” after it revived a dormant criminal case against Ankara’s mayor just months before local elections.
The justice ministry is seeking to overturn a 2021 court decision not to proceed with a defamation case against Ankara mayor Mansur Yavaş, one of the leading figures in Turkey’s political opposition, according to documents seen by the Financial Times.
The move to reopen the case, which was made in late October but has not been previously reported, comes ahead of crucial local elections in March, when President Erdoğan’s Justice and Development party (AKP) will seek to seize back control of Turkey’s two biggest cities, Istanbul and Ankara.
The decision to revive the case also comes when Turkey’s western allies are worried about Erdogan’s slide towards autocracy, with the EU warning in a report last month that in Turkey “political pluralism continued to be undermined by the targeting of opposition parties”.
Erdoğan, who has been in power for the past two decades, has been accused by rights groups of using the judiciary to silence political opponents, particularly after thousands of judges and prosecutors were purged following a 2016 coup attempt against the president. The president and his AKP have consolidated their rule over the country following their victory in May’s general election, which was seen as the tightest contest in years.
Umut Akdoğan, an MP for the Republican People’s party (CHP), Turkey’s main opposition group, alleged last week that the justice ministry’s decision to revive the case against Yavaş was a “coup attempt against the will of the people of Ankara”.
Akdoğan, who is a member of the parliamentary constitutional committee, added that the move was a “concrete example” of how Turkey’s judiciary had become “politicised”. An official inside the Ankara municipality said the government was undertaking a “political operation” to discredit Yavaş, a CHP member who won control of Ankara in 2019 after a quarter-century of rule by the AKP and its predecessors.
Turkey’s government did not respond to requests for comment on the case against Yavaş, who plans to run for re-election.
The defamation case was initially brought by a lawyer linked to a controversial Ankara building project in 2019, alleging that Yavaş had made wrongful and insulting claims about him in a Turkish newspaper interview. Prosecutors declined to pursue the allegations, a decision that was upheld in 2021 by an Istanbul court.
The justice ministry filed in late October to reopen the case on the basis of defending the legal system.
The allegations against Yavaş follow a series of similar cases against Ekrem İmamoğlu, the CHP mayor of Istanbul who is seen as a likely candidate to one day challenge Erdoğan or his successor for the presidency.
İmamoğlu faces a political ban after a court ruled in December that he had insulted public officials who ordered a rerun of his first election victory as mayor in 2019, which he won. The US described that verdict, which İmamoğlu is appealing against, as “inconsistent with respect for human rights, fundamental freedoms and the rule of law”.
The Turkish government also brought in June a criminal corruption case against İmamoğlu, which his lawyer has described as a “baseless” plot to force him out of politics.