Balkan mayors gather in Athens

During Monday’s session, the mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoglu, who hosted the network’s inaugural meeting on November 29-30, 1921, will deliver a report on the year of the presidency and transfer the presidency to Athens mayor Kostas Bakoyannis.

Bakoyannis gave his fellow mayors a private tour of the Acropolis Museum on Sunday evening and then hosted a dinner.

The 2-day event, focusing on environmentally-friendly construction technologies, will be held at the Technopolis cultural venue and the industrial museum. The mayors will also have time for a bilateral meeting and meet in four working groups on Local Climate Action; Local Democracy and Migration; Smart Cities and Digital Transformation; and Local Economic Cooperation.

Imamoglu, a social democrat, is a likely candidate for the Turkish presidency and is considered the likeliest among opposition politicians to topple President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. His sentence to a 2-year, 7-and-a-half-month prison term last December 14 for ‘insulting’ ers of the Turkish Supreme election Council “fools” in a 2020 press release is being appealed, and he has not lost his political rights, at least not yet.