İstanbul’s Ataşehir Municipality passed to the governing Justice and Development Party on Saturday, when the council elected Serdar Orhan, the joint candidate of the AKP and the Nationalist Movement Party, as acting mayor. He received 18 votes in the fourth round. He was the only candidate. The Republican People’s Party and New Party groups did not take part.

In the local elections of March 2024, Ataşehir elected Onursal Adıgüzel of the CHP with 56.38 per cent of the vote.

Adıgüzel was arrested in April and suspended from office. The council then chose a replacement from among its own members: Murat Güneş of the CHP, who defeated Orhan by 22 votes to 14 on 30 April.

Güneş was jailed on 5 October in a bribery investigation and suspended the next day. Prosecutors allege that municipal officials demanded payments from construction companies in exchange for zoning approvals and occupancy permits. His arrest is what made Saturday’s vote necessary.

Between those two council elections the arithmetic changed. On 29 September, six councillors elected on the CHP ticket joined the AKP. Others left the CHP to sit as independents. Orhan, who had lost 22–14 in April, was unopposed in October.

New Party leader Özgür Özel has alleged that councillors who changed party were pressured, blackmailed or offered money, and that Güneş was detained after refusing demands to resign. The government denies political interference and says prosecutors and courts act independently.

New Party supporters protested during the vote. Police intervened and there was a scuffle. Journalists were refused entry to the municipal building.

In Eyüpsultan the same day, the opposition held the district. Cafer Parlak, the joint CHP–New Party candidate, was elected acting mayor with 19 votes in the fourth round, after Mayor Mithat Bülent Özmen’s arrest and suspension on 6 October. The AKP says it will challenge the result, arguing that a ballot wrongly invalidated in the third round should have given its candidate the post.

Ataşehir is the third İstanbul district won by the CHP in 2024 to pass to the AKP by this route. Gaziosmanpaşa followed the jailing of Mayor Hakan Bahçetepe in June 2025. Üsküdar followed the arrest of Mayor Sinem Dedetaş and a court decision that blocked her first replacement from taking office.

Since 9 October, courts have ordered at least 34 people into pre-trial detention in municipal investigations in Bayraklı and Çeşme in İzmir and in Esenyurt in İstanbul, among them Bayraklı’s former mayor Serdar Sandal and deputy mayors in the other two districts. Esenyurt has been run since 2024 by a government-appointed trustee, Can Aksoy; the deputy mayor arrested there, Yusuf Ulutaş, had been appointed under the trustee’s administration.

Last week İlke TV reported that 40 mayors have been arrested since the 2024 elections, a cumulative figure including those since released.

The opposition has also been divided by a court ruling. In May a court removed Özgür Özel from the CHP leadership and reinstated Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu. Özel and 90 other members of parliament left in July to found the New Party.

No one has voted in Ataşehir since March 2024. The district has had three mayors.