The mayor of Izmir, Turkey’s third-largest city and a bastion of its secular opposition, joined President Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling AK Party (AKP) on Wednesday, amid a crackdown on the opposition in which dozens of mayors have been jailed.

Cemil Tugay, elected mayor in 2024 as a candidate of the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) before quitting in June, formally joined the AKP at a ceremony in Ankara, handing Erdogan’s party the mayoralty of a city it has never managed to win at the ballot box.

“I have no doubt that, with harmony between the local administration and central government, we will achieve great things,” Tugay said.

The move is a significant symbolic gain for Erdogan’s party in the western coastal city, long regarded as the heartland of Turkey’s secular, social democratic opposition.

The religiously and socially conservative AKP, founded by Erdogan in 2001, has never won the Izmir metropolitan municipality despite dominating national politics for more than two decades.

Tugay won the March 2024 election with 49% of the vote, against 37% for the AKP candidate. The CHP also won 28 of Izmir’s 30 district municipalities.

MANY MAYORS ARE IN JAIL AWAITING TRIAL

Erdogan’s AKP suffered a major electoral blow in the March 2024 mayoral elections but since then Turkish authorities have launched an unprecedented crackdown on opposition municipalities that saw many mayors targeted with corruption charges that critics say are unfounded.

Dozens of mayors, including Istanbul’s Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, who is seen as Erdogan’s main rival, are in jail pending trial. Tunc Soyer, who was the Izmir mayor before Tugay, is also among those jailed as part of a corruption probe.

The opposition has rejected the corruption accusations and says the investigations are politically motivated. The government says the judiciary is independent.

Tugay resigned from the CHP in June after a court ruling that annulled the CHP 2023 congress and stripped Ozgur Ozel of his title as CHP chairman. However, he did not join the New Party founded by Ozel and 90 opposition MPs in protest over the court ruling and continued as an independent mayor.

Ozel accused the AKP on Tuesday of using blackmail and the threat of imprisonment to pressure Tugay into defecting.

“Those who refuse to bow to this pressure … and do not betray their friends or their party will remain our brothers until the day we die. Those who sell out and leave are genuine traitors,” Ozel told his party’s parliamentary group.

Erdogan rejected such accusations at Wednesday’s ceremony.

“Those who want to serve their cities in peace see the AK Party as the safest address,” Erdogan said.

“This is the reason for the growing support for the AK Party. Any suggestion otherwise is slander and speculation.”

Tugay is the second mayor of a large city to defect to the AKP from the CHP, afterOzlem Cercioglu, mayor of Aydin, another western coastal city. Dozens of district mayors elected from opposition parties in 2024 have also joined the AKP since then.