The question of ‘democratic enclaves’ in otherwise authoritarian polities has recently received increased attention. Particularly in ‘former democracies’ with a track record of multi-party elections and peaceful transfer of power, ‘democratic resilience’ can be observed in collective discourses on sovereignty based on fair elections as well as in pockets of government, and particularly on the level of local administration. Local administrations can serve as power bases for rookie politicians and become locales of ‘springboard politics’, contributing to the gradual empowerment of opposition politics, while at the same time having to avert the national-level incumbents’ assaults on local autonomy. Yet, how can opposition local governments counter the politics of autocratizing governments, which forcefully enforce their vision of personalized rule as an alternative to rule- and value-based democratic politics? Based on expert interviews, textual analysis of municipality publications and ethnographic fieldwork carried out in 2020 and 2021, this paper examines the case of the Metropolitan Municipality of Istanbul. Governed by a series of mayors associated with Islamist parties (Welfare Party and Justice and Development Party, AKP) since 1994 and thanks to a large coalition of otherwise ideologically distant political blocs, the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) won the local elections of 2019 despite concerted attempts at manipulation and vote-rigging by the incumbent. The Metropolitan Municipality, as well as several district administrations, indeed became local power bases and laboratories for oppositional politics, significantly extending the understanding and practice of democratic politics prevalent in the less than liberal national party organization of CHP. I am particularly interested here in the municipality’s ‘counter-politics’ under the current metropolitan mayor Ekrem Imamoğlu and the question of how opposition politicians in subnational administrations counter the logic of personalization of autocratizing regimes. What kind of alternatives -political, social, cultural and gender-based- does the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality project discursively and materially? To what extent can it escape public desires for a ‘strong leader’-based municipality? And finally, what does the example of opposition politics in Istanbul tell us about the prospects for democratization in the case of regime change?