Municipal counterpower under authoritarian neoliberalism: metropolitan governance in Istanbul

How does municipal counterpower operate within authoritarian neoliberal regimes? This article examines the reinstitutionalisation of metropolitan governance in Istanbul across two electoral cycles: the 2019 and 2024 local elections. Moving beyond accounts that frame municipalities either as autonomous or subordinated, the paper conceptualises urban governance as a strategically selective terrain in which authoritarian restructuring and local counter-hegemony are relationally co-produced. Drawing on Gramscian theory and Jessop’s strategic-relational approach, it analyses how central state authorities recalibrated fiscal, legal and institutional arrangements to contain the opposition-led Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality (IMM) between 2019 and 2024, while the IMM advances redistributive, feminist, participatory and translocal strategies as part of a Gramscian ‘war of position’. Following the opposition’s decisive victory in the 2024 local elections, which removed the central state’s internal legislative vetoes, containment shifted toward coercive measures, including financial audits, judicial proceedings and the pretrial detention of the Metropolitan Mayor and numerous municipal officials. The findings demonstrate that municipal agency is neither abolished nor fully autonomous, but strategically enacted within shifting scalar hierarchies. The article contributes to debates on territorial politics by showing that reinstitutionalisation, and the balance between consent and coercion sustaining it, is a dialectical, historically contingent process.