Published on •Updated
İzmir Mayor Cemil Tugay joined President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s AK Party on Wednesday, shocking the Turkish left and handing the ruling party a symbolic prize it has failed to win in elections three times in a row.
Erdoğan presented Tugay — who ran for mayor as centre-left CHP party candidate two years ago — with an AK Party badge at the party’s Ankara headquarters on Wednesday morning and welcomed him in a speech to MPs at the opening of the legislative year.
“İzmir is different today. Very enthusiastic,” Erdoğan said. “Good things await İzmir,” Tugay told reporters.
Tugay reversed a series of public pledges that he would never join the ruling party, which he previously described as “not even a one-in-a-million chance.”
The switch makes Tugay the first right-wing mayor of Turkey’s third-largest city in 27 years. İzmir has been governed by centre-left or left-wing mayors since 1999.
In the March 2024 local elections, Tugay won 48.97% of the vote against AK Party candidate Hamza Dağ’s 37.06%, a 314,000-vote margin.
In August 2025, Tugay told a television programme “there is not even a one-in-a-million chance” of him joining the AK Party, adding that a mayor elected from the CHP had no right to switch parties.
“I find that very shameful. I am not that kind of person,” he said. In January, he told the outlet T24 that his mother said she’d disown him and his wife would divorce him if he were to join the AK Party.
Tugay left the CHP in June following a court ruling that reinstated Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu as party leader, and served as an independent for three months.
He was expected by many observers to join the YENİ or New Party founded by former CHP leader Özgür Özel, but did not.
In August, Tugay said joining any party was “out of the question”. “I will remain independent, I have said many times that I will stay independent, but in truth I am upset that this keeps being talked about every day,” he explained.
“Of course I will also map out a path for myself,” Tugay said.
Yet on 30 September he met Erdoğan at the presidential complex and two days later he resigned from both the Atatürkist Thought Association and the Social Democracy Association.
The day before the announcement, the AK Party posted a video showing a rubbish-strewn street being covered with flowers as a patriotic Turkish song about İzmir from the 1920s played, with the date “7 October 2026” appearing at the end without specifically naming Tugay.
New Party leader Özgür Özel said on Tuesday that Tugay had faced “threats, blackmail and pressure” and that the AK Party had “never won İzmir at the polls and never will.”
“This is not something you can achieve with grab-and-run tactics,” Özel said, addressing Erdoğan.
New Party spokesman Zeynel Emre said party switches could not be assessed independently of judicial proceedings against opposition mayors.
Despite Tugay’s defection, the AK Party does not control İzmir’s city council. New Party remains the largest group with 91 members, while the AK Party now has 39 seats and independents 11.
Tugay joined the CHP in 2010, was elected mayor of the Karşıyaka district in 2019, and became İzmir metropolitan mayor in 2024.