In March 2024 Sinem Dedetaş won Üsküdar with 49.9 percent of the vote, defeating the incumbent AKP mayor and ending three decades of rule by Islamist-rooted parties in a district that is home to President Erdoğan’s private residence. She was the first woman to hold the office.

She was detained on 29 July 2026 and arrested on 31 July on allegations of bribery, extortion through abuse of office, and establishing and leading a criminal organisation. The Interior Ministry suspended her on 1 August.

Under Turkish law the council then elects an acting mayor from its own members. On 5 August it elected the CHP’s Sibel Tan Çetinkaya with 22 votes. The AKP challenged the result. The İstanbul 2nd Administrative Court suspended the decision, finding that five ballots ruled invalid should have been counted. A regional court rejected the municipality’s appeal on 2 September, and the Governor’s Office called a fresh vote.

Between the two votes, the council changed shape. Four members elected on CHP tickets resigned and joined the AKP. Two opposition councillors were jailed. Four further detentions followed shortly before the vote, including a deputy mayor and a deputy council speaker. A CHP majority of 27 to 17 became 23 to 21.

The vote went to four rounds. Two of the 42 ballots in the first round were ruled invalid — one for a dot on the paper, one for a missing letter. The AKP candidate took it 23 to 19. Two of his votes in the final round were challenged. The chair declared him elected.

What the opposition alleges

Özgür Çelik, İstanbul provincial chair of the New Party, says one of the four councillors who crossed the floor, Ayhan Aydın, phoned him in tears. According to Çelik, Aydın said a prosecutor had threatened him with arrest, that his wife and son are disabled, and that he gave in because there was no one else to care for them.

Çelik further alleges that the four defectors were held for four days at a hotel outside İstanbul under police supervision, cut off from their families — one relative flying in from Africa to try to reach him.

His summary: the election in Üsküdar was not won by the AKP, but by prosecutors at the Kartal courthouse and the İstanbul governor.

The İstanbul Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office has opened an investigation — into Çelik’s allegation. It has summoned Aydın to give information about it.

From Brussels

Nacho Sánchez Amor, the European Parliament’s rapporteur on Turkey, wrote that what happened in Üsküdar is a mockery of democracy, that the whole system was perverted in order to win what had been lost at the ballot box, and that it took arrests, defections, threats and four rounds of voting to do it. He called it a blatant power grab.

The arithmetic

Üsküdar is the ninth İstanbul district won by CHP candidates in 2024 now run by the AKP or by a government-appointed trustee. The winning candidates in those nine districts received 918,443 votes between them.

Nationally, more than thirty opposition mayors have been suspended since the 2024 elections.

Opposition leader Özgür Özel put the mechanism plainly before the vote: if the margin is five, detain six.