Turkey on Monday blocked the latest X campaign account of İstanbul mayor and main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) presidential candidate Ekrem İmamoğlu, in the latest step of a fast-escalating crackdown on his online presence, the Freedom of Expression Association (İFÖD) said.
The move came days after İstanbul prosecutors filed a nearly 4,000-page indictment against İmamoğlu on November 11, accusing him of running a “criminal organization” within the metropolitan municipality and committing 142 separate offenses, from bribery and bid rigging to money laundering. The case names İmamoğlu as the lead defendant among 402 suspects and seeks a prison sentence of more than 2,000 years, with some reports putting the maximum at up to 2,430 years
Four campaign accounts blocked in five days
Following the indictment, access bans on İmamoğlu’s campaign infrastructure on X came in quick succession. According to İFÖD’s EngelliWeb project, campaign accounts were blocked on November 13, 14 and 15 by İstanbul criminal courts of peace invoking Article 8/A of Law No. 5651 and citing the protection of “national security” and “public order.”
On Monday, authorities extended those measures to yet another campaign account, effectively wiping out İmamoğlu’s domestic campaign presence on the platform after X complied with the latest court order and made the account invisible in Turkey.
İmamoğlu had already been pushed off his main audience on X earlier in the year. His personal account, with nearly 10 million followers, was blocked in Turkey on April 24 on identical “national security” grounds, and his separate international account was restricted in May.
With each new ban, his campaign team opened replacement accounts to continue communicating with voters, only to see those accounts rapidly targeted by fresh court decisions.
‘Pile of lies built through threats and coercion’
The indictment portrays İmamoğlu as the head of a vast municipal patronage machine that prosecutors claim inflicted billions of lira in losses on the public through corrupt tenders and illicit campaign financing.
İmamoğlu has flatly rejected the charges, calling the file “a pile of lies built through threats and coercion” and framing the case as an attempt by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government to neutralize its most potent rival ahead of the 2028 presidential election. Opposition parties, legal experts and rights groups have similarly condemned the prosecution as a textbook example of “judicial engineering” to reshape the political field.
The mayor, a senior CHP figure, was detained on March 19 and jailed days later on corruption charges, triggering the largest wave of anti-government protests in Turkey in more than a decade.
CHP under pressure after 2024 local election gains
İmamoğlu first won the İstanbul mayoralty in 2019, dealing Erdoğan and the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) a historic defeat in Turkey’s largest city. When the authorities annulled that result citing alleged irregularities, he won the rerun election by an even larger margin, cementing his status as the president’s most credible challenger.
He was formally declared the CHP’s presidential candidate in March for the next general election, scheduled for 2028. But a growing web of criminal cases and legal rulings now hangs over his political future, raising the specter of a de facto ban from politics if he is convicted.
The pressure extends far beyond a single figure. Since the CHP’s sweeping victory in the March 2024 local elections, 16 of the party’s mayors have been jailed and 13 municipalities placed under government-appointed trustees, according to a CHP report released in late October. Party officials say this pattern amounts to a systemic attempt to roll back the opposition’s ballot box gains through administrative and judicial means.
Turkey sinks to bottom of Europe on internet freedoms
The latest blocks on İmamoğlu’s campaign accounts come as international monitors warn that Turkey has become one of the world’s most repressive environments for online expression. In Freedom House’s “Freedom on the Net 2025” assessment, Turkey received a score of 31 out of 100 and was classified as “Not Free,” placing it in the bottom tier of 72 countries surveyed.
A separate analysis of the same data found that Turkey ranks 56th out of 72 states and is the lowest-scoring country in Europe included in the study.
Rights groups say the İmamoğlu case illustrates how these structural restrictions are now being deployed directly against high-profile political opponents. For critics, the combination of mass indictments, trustee takeovers of opposition municipalities and the systematic erasure of dissident voices from social media confirms that Turkey’s digital landscape has become an extension of its broader authoritarian turn.
