Gilded doors, crystal chandeliers, marble bathrooms — a sea of luxury greeted Adnan Selcuk Mizrakli when he entered Diyarbakir’s city hall as the mainly Kurdish provincial capital’s new mayor. “Behold, behold,” Mizrakli told a group of journalists filming the event. “They built themselves palaces with the people’s money.”

The former doctor who was elected on the left-leaning pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP) ticket with 63% of the vote was referring to the profligacy of his predecessor. Cumali Atilla, a bureaucrat from Ankara, had run the place since November 2016 under orders from the central government.

Atilla and his fellow administrators replaced 95 democratically elected mayors in the predominantly Kurdish southeast region. They were booted out on dubious terrorism charges and many were jailed, part of a wider crackdown on the Kurdish political movement inspired by imprisoned Kurdistan Workers Party leader Abdullah Ocalan.

The perks the administrators showered on themselves have become emblematic of Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). The AKP’s tone-deaf displays of opulence in the midst of spiraling inflation and joblessness are seen as one of the main reasons the country’s largest cities, including Istanbul, Ankara and Adana, fell to the opposition in the March 31 municipal elections.