The Party That Built Modern Turkey Is Being Torn Apart. Who Is Really Doing the Tearing?

In May 2026, a Turkish court declared the main opposition party’s leadership election “utterly null and void” — a ruling that reversed a democratic vote, reinstated a leader who had lost 13 consecutive elections, and left the country’s principal opposition in a state of constitutional paralysis. TurkishBritish Magazine examines what happened, what it means, and what it says about the state of Turkish democracy.

By TurkishBritish Magazine  |  Summer 2026

On 2 June 2026, the Ankara 36th Regional Court of Appeal issued a ruling that most Turkish legal scholars said they had never seen applied to a political party. The 38th Ordinary Congress of the Republican People’s Party — held in November 2023, in which Oz̈gür Özel was elected general chairman — was declared void ab initio: null from the beginning, as if it had never happened. Three years of party decisions, resolutions and elections were swept away in a single judgment. The previous general chairman, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, was, under the logic of the ruling, restored to the position he had held before a democratic vote removed him.

This is not a story about the internal affairs of a political party. It is a story about the condition of democracy in a country that has, for more than two decades, been moving away from the institutional checks that democracies require in order to function. Understanding what happened requires understanding the context that produced it — and that context is not confined to the legal texts of the ruling.

Context: Twenty-Five Years, One Direction

The Justice and Development Party — AKP — has governed Turkey since November 2002. That is a long time by any measure: long enough to have appointed the overwhelming majority of sitting judges and prosecutors; long enough to have consolidated the country’s media landscape into near-total alignment with the government’s preferences; long enough to have built a set of structural advantages in elections that independent observers describe as significant without necessarily being fraudulent.

The rule-of-law indicators tell a consistent story over that period. Turkey has fallen steadily in the World Justice Project Rule of Law Index, the Freedom House democracy ratings, and the Reporters Without Borders press freedom index. These are not instruments of Western bias; they are methodologically consistent measures that track institutional performance over time. They show a country in which the independence of the judiciary from the executive has diminished substantially, and in which the space for political opposition has narrowed in ways that are structural rather than occasional.

Against this backdrop, the 2024 local elections produced a result that was, from the ruling party’s perspective, alarming. CHP — the Republican People’s Party, founded by Atatük in 1923 and the principal opposition party for most of the republic’s history — became the largest party in Turkey by vote share for the first time in decades. Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir and a string of major cities were held or won by CHP candidates. The party’s new leadership, which had taken over in November 2023 under Özel, had managed something that the previous leadership had conspicuously failed to do: it had expanded the party’s appeal beyond its traditional base.

The Ruling: What “Mutlak Butlan” Actually Means

“Mutlak butlan” — absolute nullity — is a concept drawn from civil law and applied, in Turkish legislation, primarily to family law situations such as void marriages. Its application to the democratic congress of a political party was, according to legal scholars who commented publicly on the ruling, without modern precedent in Turkish constitutional practice.

The constitutional logic of the ruling is contested on grounds that go beyond party politics. Under the Turkish constitution, political parties are recognised as indispensable components of democratic life; their organisation is guaranteed by Article 68 and 69. More specifically, the oversight of party elections and congresses is assigned by law to the Supreme Electoral Council — the Yüksek Seçim Kurulu, or YSK — not to the civil court system. The YSK had overseen and validated the November 2023 congress.

For a regional court of appeal to subsequently declare that congress void — using provisions of the Civil Code designed for matters of private law — creates a jurisdictional question that constitutional lawyers describe, in the terms used in the source documents reviewed by this magazine, as “an open constitutional violation.” The separation of powers that assigns party oversight to the YSK was, in the view of most independent legal commentators, bypassed by the ruling.

The practical consequence was immediate: the party’s headquarters in Ankara became the site of a standoff. Özel’s supporters gathered; Kılıçdaroğlu’s allies sought to take control of the building. Police were present. The party was, in the space of a single afternoon, operating with two parallel structures claiming authority over the same organisation.

Kılıçdaroğlu: The Thirteen-Election Record

Any honest account of the CHP crisis requires honest engagement with Kılıçdaroğlu’s record. He became party chairman in 2010 and led CHP through thirteen consecutive electoral contests without winning a national majority. These included general elections in 2011, 2015 (twice), 2018 and 2023; local elections in 2014, 2019 and 2023; and multiple referendum campaigns. The 2023 presidential election, in which he was the joint candidate of the whole opposition bloc, ended with a second-round defeat despite polls suggesting the race was competitive.

In 2011, Kılıçdaroğlu publicly stated that he would resign if CHP received less than 30% of the vote. CHP received 26%. He did not resign. He described the result as “our most successful period.”

The record is not in dispute. What is in dispute is what the record means. Kılıçdaroğlu’s supporters argue that leading any opposition in Turkey’s media environment — where state-aligned outlets dominate, where independent journalists face prosecution, and where the structural advantages of incumbency are substantial — is intrinsically difficult, and that the comparison to AKP’s electoral performance ignores those conditions. The counter-argument — made by the Change Movement that defeated him — is that other leaders have operated in equally hostile conditions and produced better results, and that the 2024 local elections, held within months of Özel’s election as chairman, demonstrated that the problem was not the conditions but the leadership.

There is also a more pointed version of the critique, voiced by commentators including Yilmaz Özdil (in his assessment of what he calls Turkey’s opposition management problem), which argues that a leader who is consistently, persistently unable to win against a government accumulating the corruption indicators and democratic deficits that AKP has accumulated, over 13 years, raises questions that go beyond personal competence. Özdil’s framing — which TBMag presents as a significant current of Turkish political commentary, not as an established fact — is that such a pattern suggests a leader who functions as a containment vessel for opposition energy rather than a conduit for it. Whether that represents active collaboration, passive convenience, or simply catastrophic incompetence is a question that cannot be definitively answered from the available evidence.

The Asymmetry of Justice

The context in which this judicial intervention occurred is essential to understanding it. The period between 2023 and 2026 has seen a systematic pattern in the application of Turkish law to opposition figures.

Ekrem İmamoğlu, elected Mayor of Istanbul in 2019 and re-elected in 2024, was arrested in March 2025 on charges related to his communication with YSK officials — charges that his lawyers and international observers describe as legally strained. He has been held in pre-trial detention for 15 months at the time of writing, without trial. The timing — shortly before he was expected to declare a presidential candidacy — has been noted by everyone from the Party of European Socialists to the European Parliament.

Multiple other CHP-governed municipalities have had government-appointed trustees installed, removing elected officials from their positions. These trustees operate without the democratic mandate that the removed officials held.

Against this record of intervention in opposition governance, the allegations that triggered the CHP congress case — that delegate registrations at the November 2023 congress contained procedural irregularities — produced a disproportionate remedy. The appropriate response to procedural irregularities in a party election is, in any comparable democratic system, either a rerun of the affected process or a fine. The voiding of three years of party decisions, the removal of a leadership elected by delegates, and the reinstatement of a leader who had been democratically removed: no comparable action has been taken against any governing-party process in Turkey’s recent history.

Meanwhile, the documented corruption cases that have emerged from AKP’s decades in power — the 2013 corruption investigation that produced evidence of shoe boxes filled with cash, the allegations against former Istanbul mayor Melih Gökçek and others, the public resource flows through foundations with documented conflicts of interest — have not produced comparable judicial consequences. The files exist. The prosecutions do not.

The Change Movement and Its Unfinished Business

The Change Movement that brought Özel to the CHP chairmanship in November 2023 was a genuine democratic transformation within the party. Within five months of taking power, CHP had become the largest party in Turkey by vote share — a result that validated, empirically, the argument that the problem had been leadership rather than conditions.

But the analysis available in the documents reviewed by TBMag — particularly the extended essay published by Kagan Sarikaya — makes a compelling case that the Change Movement, while successfully displacing the previous leadership, failed to perform what political scientists call a “founding separation”: the explicit articulation of what the new leadership stood for as distinct not just in personnel but in method and political ethics from what preceded it.

The failure to draw that line clearly left the previous leadership’s moral and political legitimacy intact. It remained available for rehabilitation — by those inside the party who wished to use it, and by external actors who found it useful. The ruling party, in this reading, did not create the crisis from nothing: it found a crack in an incomplete transformation and widened it.

This does not exonerate the judicial intervention, which remains constitutionally anomalous. But it explains why the intervention found a purchase. A fully consolidated democratic transformation within CHP would have left fewer structural handholds for such a manoeuvre.

The Structural Picture: Autocratic Legalism

Political scientists have a term for what is happening in Turkey. It is called “autocratic legalism” — sometimes “competitive authoritarianism” or “selective legalism.” The concept describes a system in which formal legal institutions continue to exist and operate, but are deployed asymmetrically: protecting the powerful from accountability while exposing the opposition to the full weight of legal processes that would not be applied in the same way to governing-party figures.

The concept does not require that every judge be personally corrupt, or that every case be explicitly orchestrated from above. It requires only that a sufficient proportion of the institutional apparatus has been oriented, over time, toward outcomes that protect the system rather than the law. When the judiciary is populated, at its lower and middle levels, primarily by graduates of institutions aligned with the governing coalition — as Turkish legal scholars document has increasingly been the case — systemic bias can emerge without individual instruction.

The result is a system that presents itself as a rule-of-law state — with courts, procedures, trials, appeals — while producing outcomes that a genuinely independent judiciary would not produce. This is not the same as raw authoritarianism; it is more sophisticated and considerably harder to challenge, because every individual legal act has the formal trappings of legality. The mutlak butlan ruling is a case in point: it uses legal terminology, cites provisions of the Civil Code, and was issued by a duly constituted court. It is only when viewed against the constitutional framework, the precedent record, and the pattern of selective application that its character becomes clear.

What Comes Next

The immediate future depends on the Yargitay — the Court of Cassation, Turkey’s highest civil court. The mutlak butlan ruling has been appealed; the Yargitay’s decision will determine whether the ruling stands, is modified, or is overturned. A Yargitay reversal would restore Özel’s legal position as chairman but would not resolve the structural fissure within the party. A Yargitay confirmation would deepen the crisis and make the prospect of a formal party split significantly more likely.

If Özel and the Change Movement element of CHP ultimately decide that the party as a formal institution cannot be reclaimed through legal means, the creation of a new political vehicle becomes a realistic scenario. This would carry significant risks — new parties rarely succeed in first-past-the-post systems — but also significant potential, if the new party can be built on a genuinely founding political identity rather than simply as a CHP splinter.

The opposition voter base faces a specific kind of political exhaustion. The sequence of events since 2023 — a promising national result in local elections, followed by the arrest of the most electorally formidable opposition figure, followed by the judicial decapitation of the party’s elected leadership — represents a sustained assault on the premise that democratic participation produces meaningful outcomes. Survey evidence and electoral behaviour in comparable situations internationally suggest that sustained attacks on opposition viability produce, over time, voter demobilisation: not conversion to the governing party, but disengagement from the process itself. This, too, serves the governing coalition’s interests.

The Constitutional Answer: What the Law Actually Says

On the specific question of constitutional placement: the Turkish constitution’s Article 68 establishes political parties as the fundamental institutions of democratic political life. Article 69 governs the conditions under which parties may be closed by the Constitutional Court — a high threshold designed to protect political pluralism.

Neither provision contemplates a scenario in which an ordinary civil court, using provisions of the Civil Code, can void a party congress and reinstall a previous leadership. The YSK’s constitutional mandate over party elections is established by law; it approved the November 2023 congress. The subsequent civil court action operates in a constitutional gap that has not previously been tested in Turkish jurisprudence.

The appropriate remedy for procedural irregularities in a party congress — if they exist and are material — is either a new congress or a referral to the YSK for review of the specific irregularity. The remedy of voiding the congress entirely, reinstating a previous leadership, and declaring three years of party decisions null: this is a remedy for which no proportionate legal basis exists in Turkish law as applied to any comparable political situation. Its selective application to the main opposition party, in the specific political context of 2026, is what gives the ruling its character.