Shortly after a Turkish court ruled that CHP chairman Özgür Özel should be removed from office and former party leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu should temporarily return, angry CHP members gathered at the party headquarters in Ankara. „Hain Kemal” – “traitor Kemal” – they chanted, as a portrait of Kilicdaroglu was pulled from the wall and smashed on the ground.
Emotions within the party have hardly calmed down since then. On Sunday, supporters of Özel and Kilicdaroglu squared off in front of the party office in Ankara. Police officers intervened.
Turkish lawyers and political analysts speak of an exceptional statement in the history of the Turkish republic. Never before has a judge intervened in this way with the leadership of a major opposition party. The court declared the 2023 CHP Congress, where Özel was elected chairman, invalid due to alleged procedural irregularities and provisionally reinstated Kilicdaroglu as party leader.
“I see this as the next phase in the deepening of authoritarianism in Turkey,” political scientist Seren Selvin Korkmaz of think tank IstanPol said by telephone. “With the arrest and prosecution of prominent CHP politicians for alleged corruption, the opposition was previously put under heavy pressure. But this goes even further: now even the internal party structure of the CHP is being affected. In fact, elections that the party itself has organized are no longer recognized. This is very drastic from a political and democratic point of view.”
Historic opportunity missed
And so Kilicdaroglu is back in the spotlight, after disappearing into the background in 2023. Kilicdaroglu is Özel’s predecessor and was at the helm of the party for thirteen years. In 2023, he lost the presidential elections to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The 2023 elections were seen as a historic opportunity to oust Erdogan from power after more than two decades. There was great disappointment within the opposition when Kilicdaroglu lost.
After the election defeat, a fierce power struggle flared up in the CHP over the future of the party and Kilicdaroglu’s leadership. A large part of the supporters wanted Kilicdaroglu to resign, because the party under his leadership lost all national elections to Erdogan’s AK Party. Only in the 2019 local elections did the CHP achieve a historic victory, when the party regained the mayoral posts of Istanbul and Ankara from the AK Party.
With the arrival of Özel as party leader at the end of 2023, the CHP chose a clearly different course. Under his leadership, the party put up fiercer opposition to Erdogan and tried more emphatically to connect with dissatisfied voters outside the traditionally secular support base. This yielded success in the 2024 local elections, when the CHP managed to retain large cities, captured new municipalities from the AK Party and became the largest party nationally for the first time in decades.
According to critics and human rights organizations, that success quickly became a thorn in Erdogan’s side and the government further increased legal pressure on CHP leaders. According to them, the new lawsuit over Özel’s party chairmanship fits into that broader campaign to weaken the opposition. The CHP itself speaks of a “legal coup”.
The ruling also comes at a time when the party is already under heavy pressure: dozens of CHP politicians and mayors have been arrested or prosecuted in recent months for alleged corruption, while Istanbul’s popular mayor, Ekrem Imamoglu, remains in prison.
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Legally dubious methods
What’s happening within the CHP in some ways mirrors what’s happening in Turkey as a whole, says Oxford University political scientist Karabekir Akkoyunlu. “Politicians who can no longer win elections, but want to maintain their position at all costs, are increasingly turning to undemocratic and legally dubious methods.”
That is precisely why this party crisis is causing a lot of misunderstanding within the CHP. The fact that prominent party members themselves are now contributing to internal divisions and legal battles, while the opposition is already under heavy pressure, is a sensitive issue among supporters. The question is increasingly being asked within the party why confrontation has been chosen at this time.
“The most logical explanation is that some politicians no longer act on the basis of democratic principles or the national interest, but are mainly concerned with their own political future and their own position of power. To protect that, they seem willing to go very far, even if it damages the party or the country,” says Akkoyunlu on the phone. “That is why I see the crisis within the CHP as a reflection of broader developments in Turkey. You also see a political culture emerging at the national level in which retaining power becomes more important than democratic norms.”
According to political scientist Korkmaz, in addition to the broader political culture, the personal beliefs of Kilicdaroglu himself also play an important role in the conflict. She has been following the former party leader for some time and thinks that he really believes that injustice has been done to him within the party and that the CHP has deteriorated morally. “He is also convinced that the 2024 election victory came from the strategy he had built himself, and not from the leadership of Özgür Özel. In his eyes, Özel has reaped the benefits of a strategy that had already been developed under him,” she says by telephone.
According to Korkmaz, another factor that plays a role is that Turkish politicians are generally unable to deal with election losses. “But I think the broader development is more important than individual persons. For me, it is not just about Kilicdaroglu or Özel, but about the fact that Turkey is once again taking a step towards a system in which the opposition is structurally weakened.”
The Public Prosecution Service in Istanbul immediately launched a large-scale investigation on Saturday into alleged irregularities surrounding the CHP congress. Justice is investigating allegations that delegates were pressured or bribed. Thirteen suspects were arrested on suspicion of bribery and money laundering in raids in Istanbul and other provinces, including Ankara and Izmir.
The unrest also spread to the financial markets. The Turkish stock market lost more than 6 percent, after which the central bank had to use billions of dollars from its reserves to slow a further fall of the lira, according to Turkish media.
Özel remains influential
Despite the court ruling, Özgur Özel remains influential within the party for the time being. During a closed faction meeting, the CHP re-elected him as party leader in parliament on Saturday. Kilicdaroglu publicly congratulated him for this in front of the cameras, although he looked visibly tense after the wave of criticism and angry reactions he has received since Friday.
The big question now is which direction the CHP will move in the coming weeks. Özel tried to challenge the ruling legally, but without success: the Supreme Electoral Council rejected his request. This threatens to further deepen the crisis within the largest opposition party, at a time when many Turks are already losing confidence in politics.
The biggest problem is that people are becoming increasingly alienated from politics, says Korkmaz. “The results of internal elections within an opposition party are being called into question. This further erodes confidence in democratic processes. At the same time, a divided CHP weakens the opposition towards new elections, giving the government more control over the political playing field.”
The next presidential elections are scheduled for 2028. Although he has reached his maximum term in office, Erdogan has repeatedly hinted that he wants to run again. To be eligible for re-election, early elections would be necessary. At the same time, Erdogan’s party is doing historically poor in the polls, partly due to persistently high inflation and economic dissatisfaction. A weakened opposition would therefore significantly increase its chances of another victory.
Korkmaz: “For the opposition, everything depends on whether it succeeds in organizing a common political line. If that fails, the anger in society could turn into political apathy or fragmentation of votes in favor of smaller parties.”
While Erdogan is increasingly profiling himself internationally, European leaders are seeking rapprochement with Turkey for defense cooperation in the run-up to the NATO summit in Turkey in July. Erdogan also maintains good ties with US President Donald Trump. But in his own country he is tightening the thumbscrews further.
