He held his central pre-election gathering of the party ahead of the municipal elections in Turkey the candidate of the ruling party for the municipality of Istanbul Murat Kurum with the keynote speaker Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
The Turkish president referred, among other things, to the Fall of Constantinople, while regarding the reopening of Hagia Sophia as a mosque, he said that an 80-year dream had come true.
At the start of his speech he sang the well-known song “I love him” that he used to sing during his campaign rallies last year and then recited in Arabic the passage from the Koran which refers to the Fall of the City.
He then referred to the conversion of Hagia Sophia into a mosque.
“We have fulfilled the 80-year dream of our nation and reopened the Hagia Sophia for worship, glory be to Allah. Today, according to the will of Sultan Muhammad, the call to prayer is heard five times a day from the minarets of the Hagia Sophia mosque, and hadith, takbir, salawat and recitations of the Koran adorn its domes.
Erdogan once more attacked Imamoglu
A central slogan of Erdoğan’s election campaign in these municipal elections is “Istanbul once more”, a slogan that was also dominant in today’s rally at Istanbul’s old airport. Recapturing Istanbul, the mayor of which he began his meteoric rise in politics, has become a key objective for Erdogan in order to complete his success in last year’s presidential election.
He launched an attack once morest the current mayor, Ekrem Imamoglu, accusing him of incompetence and claiming that his five years in office did not achieve any results and were a waste of time. As he said, Istanbul’s problem is not a lack of resources and capabilities, but a lack of vision and capacity.
He particularly highlighted his own work when he was mayor of Istanbul from 1994 to 1998, but also subsequently as prime minister and president of the country.
He also referred to the video recently circulated on social media in which officials from Imamoglu’s Republican People’s Party (CHP) are seen counting wads of cash. Tayyip Erdoğan said the CHP might not explain the origin of the money. “They pollute politics. They pollute the votes of those who trusted their honor. They are polluting Istanbul,” he said.
The 53-year-old current mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoglou, is today considered the most powerful political opponent that the Kemalist opposition camp has raised in the last 20 years. It is a common assessment that Istanbul, with more than 16 million inhabitants, with a population greater than 131 countries in the world, is the “key” to power in the country.
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