The leader of the main Turkish opposition party, CHP, Ozgur Ozel, inaugurates the cultural center named after the late Ferdi Zeyrek, the former mayor of Manisa Metropolitan Municipality in Konak, Izmir, Turkey, on April 3, 2026. The judicial removal of Ozel from leadership of the CHP is another blow to Turkish democracy. (Shutterstock/idiltofolo)

The Controlled ‘Demolition’ of Turkish Democracy

Share this link on Facebook

Share this page on X (Twitter)

Share this link on LinkedIn

Share this page on Reddit

Email a link to this page

The court order to replace Turkey’s leading opposition party indicates that President Erdogan is stacking the deck for an early election.

Last Thursday’s court order to remove Ozgur Ozel as the elected leader of CHP (Republican People’s Party), Turkey’s secular opposition, and replace him with the party’s former leader, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, is characteristic of the suppression of opposition that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has stood for since his AKP (the Justice and Development Party) came to power in 2002.

A disciple of Necmettin Erbakan, the father of political Islam in Turkey, Erdogan continued in his footsteps as mayor of Istanbul in 1994 and made no bones about the fact that democracy was not his aim but the vehicle for his movement. When Erbakan’s Welfare Party was dissolved in 1998 for its challenge to secularism, and Erdogan received a short-term prison sentence, he changed tack.

The AKP, founded in 2001, presented itself as Western, reformist, moderate, and neoliberal, and Turkey’s allies in Europe and the United States bought into the narrative. The start of European Union accession talks in 2005 provided Erdogan with the alibi he needed to send the military back to the barracks and........

© The National Interest