BERLIN (DW News) — The Kurdish-majority city of Van in eastern Turkey is just one place where authorities are preventing opposition politicians from taking up the offices to which they were elected.

DW met with one such official, who says she is being unfairly prevented from becoming mayor. This as Turkey’s largest city, Istanbul, gears up for a re-run of its mayoral election in several weeks time. The candidate from President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s party, the AKP, lost to opposition mayoral candidate Ekrem Imamoglu, but the AKP has since contested that result.