A Trial By Design

When the ruling party lost control of Istanbul in March 2019, they pressured the Supreme Election Council to annul the results. Their logic was that the population made a mistake. When the population corrected that "mistake" by re-electing İmamoğlu with an historic 800,000-vote landslide, the tactical reality shifted.

The state recognized that beating İmamoğlu in a fair election was increasingly unlikely. The administrative siege over municipal operations began immediately, but it was not enough to drain his popularity. Consequently, the battleground was moved to the only sector the executive branch directly controlled: the courtrooms.

While the "fool verdict" was held pending appeal—acting as a permanent sword of Damocles over his political future—the administrative state opened a new front. More than 30 years after his graduation, political bodies suddenly moved to annul his university diploma.

This was not an academic dispute. Under the Turkish Constitution, a university degree is a strict prerequisite for running for President of the Republic. By attacking his diploma, the establishment sought to engineer a technical disqualification without relying entirely on the slow, heavily scrutinized criminal appeals process. Hours after this maneuver escalated, sudden detention followed.

The state has adopted a "buckshot" legal strategy. Recognizing that one case might attract too much international condemnation or fall apart under public scrutiny, the Interior Ministry and state prosecutors opened more than a dozen major investigation files.

From baseless allegations of "terror-linked" municipal hiring practices to manufacturing public bid-rigging charges stemming from his time as a district mayor years prior, the sheer volume of cases is designed to project an illusion of criminality and ensure that at least one political ban sticks.