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.