The new Mayor of Istanbul concluded his two-day visit to Sarajevo on Sunday after having met with leaders of the Sarajevo Canton but not with his counterpart, which some interpreted as a diplomatic scandal but Sarajevo's Mayor Abdulah Skaka sees as a consequence of specific political circumstances.

Ekrem Imamoglu has been elected mayor of Istanbul in June after he had twice beaten the candidate of the ruling AKP, the ruling party of President Recep Tayyib Erdogan – a personal friend of Bakir Izetbegovic, the leader of the main Bosniak party in the country, the Party for Democratic Action (SDA).

The current Mayor of Sarajevo, Abdulah Skaka, is a member of the SDA and Imamoglu could be running against Erdogan in four years.

“Turkey is a friendly state, the Turks are friendly people and they are always welcome here. Sometimes our friends don't understand specific political circumstances very well, such as the competencies of the City and the Canton, sometimes those are being politicised, but we don't take that badly,” Skaka said.

Skaka’s political opponents reacted swiftly to his comment.

“Above all, Abdulah Skaka gave himself the right to publicly preach about ‘not knowing political circumstances’ to a mayor of a city which has 15 million citizens, where he won the biggest percentage of the vote among all Istanbul’s mayors in the past 30 years,” the Social Democratic Party (SDP) said.

“It’s clear that here we are talking about the continued submissive attitude of the SDA and their political allies toward Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his party,” the party added.

The liberal Nasa Stranka (NS) had a similar reaction.

“The lack of political freedom of the mayor of Sarajevo is shameful and it would be hypocritical of him if he ever spoke of Sarajevo as a free city again as he is doing everything he can to close its doors to all free-thinking people. Istanbul is one of the biggest cities in the world and is at the same time one of the biggest friends of Sarajevo,” a statement by the party said.

The leader of the People and Justice party (Narod i Pravda, NiP), Elmedin Konakovic, also criticised the mayor.

“What will happen when the Republican People’s Party (CHP) is in power in Turkey? Will Turkey then stop being out sister country? Will the Ottoman Empire be erased from our history together with all the connections we have? That is a policy we are fighting against,” he said.

Konakovic added that, together with the mayor of Sarajevo’s Old Town municipality, he met with Imamoglu the day before.

He described Istanbul's mayor as someone who “won millions of votes and controls a budget of 10 billion Euros,” adding that they spoke about cooperation between Sarajevo and Istanbul “because the Sarajevo Canton and the City of Sarajevo obviously do not want to.”

N1 has tried to get a reaction from the SDA but without success.

Although the Turkish Embassy in Sarajevo said that a meeting between the two mayors was not planned, harsh reactions were expected, having in mind several scandals that took place over the past few years.

The fact that Turkish Nobel laureate, writer Orhan Pamuk, was not declared an honorary citizen of Sarajevo is among them. An official explanation was never provided for why that was the case, but unofficially, the reason was his criticism of Erdogan.

Mathematics professor Ali Lafcioglu, who contributed over the years to the success of many of his Bosnian students, was also stripped of the Plaque of the City of Sarajevo without any official explanation, but some argued it was because he was allegedly close to the FETO movement.