Mansur Yavaş

Mansur Yavaş ( Turkish pronunciation: [mɑnˈsuɾ jɑˈvɑʃ]; born 23 May 1955) is a Turkish lawyer and politician who is currently the Mayor of Ankara, holding the office since April 2019. He was elected in the 2019 Ankara mayoral election as the candidate of the Nation Alliance, an opposition alliance formed by the Republican People's Party (CHP) and the Good Party.

A lawyer by profession, Yavaş originally entered politics as a nationalist politician. He was the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) Mayor of Beypazarı, a district of Ankara, in the 1999 Turkish local elections. He served until 2009 and left the MHP in 2013. He joined the CHP the same year and was the CHP's candidate for the 2014 Ankara mayoral local election, where official results claimed that he had lost by 1 percentage point. The elections were disputed and were even referred to the European Court of Human Rights due to alleged fraud and irregularities. Despite briefly leaving the CHP, Yavaş returned to politics before the 2019 Turkish local elections to stand again as the CHP's candidate, this time with support from the Good Party, which formed the Nation Alliance together with the CHP). He was elected with 50.9% of the vote.