The main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) on Sunday held an extraordinary meeting where its chair, Özgür Özel, is favored to win an intraparty election. The convention in the capital, Ankara, aims to prevent what the CHP calls an attempt to appoint a trustee to the party amid allegations of corruption in the last such election in Türkiye’s oldest party.
Özel would have competed with Ümit Uysal, the CHP mayor for the southern province of Antalya’s Muratpaşa district, but he declared his withdrawal from the race at the last minute. Berhan Şimşek, an actor who was a former lawmaker for the party, remained in the race before the head of the electoral committee picked for Sunday’s race announced later that Özel would be the only candidate.
Delegates from across Türkiye will vote at the election and attend the convention, which Özel participated in as he was flanked by former CHP chairs, including his predecessor Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, who earlier announced he would not compete against Özel upon growing rumors of a comeback. Altan Öymen, Hikmet Çetin, and former chair of the now-defunct CHP affiliate Social Democratic Populist Party (SHP), Murat Karayalçın, backed Özel at the convention. Four men were seated next to Özel, and an empty seat bore the name of CHP’s Istanbul mayor, Ekrem Imamoğlu, who was arrested in March on corruption charges. The culture center in Ankara’s Yenimahalle district, which was the venue of the convention, was adorned with posters of Özel, Imamoğlu and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of the Republic of Türkiye and the CHP.
Some 1,300 delegates will vote for the party’s chair, as well as its 60-strong Party Assembly, where Özel’s candidates will vie for seats against candidates of CHP’s Istanbul lawmaker Oğuz Kaan Salıcı. Salıcı, an influential name in the party, had proposed a “checks and balances” list to counter Özel’s candidate list in the previous CHP convention, with the election in November 2023. Critics of the incumbent administration are expected to vote for Salıcı’s list.
The CHP sought to transform itself after Kılıçdaroğlu lost his presidential bid against incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in the 2023 elections despite an alliance it had formed with five other opposition parties. In November that year, Kılıçdaroğlu’s long reign in the CHP ended when Özel unseated him in an intraparty vote.
Özel later led the party to a historic breakthrough in the March 31 municipal elections, surpassing the CHP’s traditional 25% support threshold. His success in the local elections has given him a strong mandate, but the corruption allegations and party infighting continue challenging his leadership.
Despite this electoral success, factional disputes continue to divide the party, with Kılıçdaroğlu’s loyalists resisting Özel’s leadership while Imamoğlu’s supporters position themselves for the party’s future leadership battle. The CHP’s internal conflict has created uncertainty over its direction ahead of the next general elections, with both sides vying for control over the party’s strategic decisions.
This continuing tension within the party is partly rooted in a recently launched judicial probe into allegations that Özel “bought” delegate votes to oust Kılıçdaroğlu in the November vote. Investigators are examining claims from CHP delegates who say they were offered bribes, including cash, homes and municipal positions, to switch their votes.
However, Özel is in a strong position after Imamoğlu’s arrest, driving himself forward as a new leading figure and mobilizing the masses. Türkiye was rocked by riots incited by Özel after the arrest of the mayor, who is also a key figure within the party. Kılıçdaroğlu’s defeat in the intraparty election was partly due to Imamoğlu and like-minded CHP members endorsing Özel.
Özel, a former pharmacist who has stepped in as the party’s main public flagbearer, launched a campaign to gather signatures for a petition calling for Imamoğlu’s release and early elections. Özel had recently announced that protests would be held in a different one of Türkiye’s 81 provinces every weekend and a different district of Istanbul every Wednesday.
The CHP, which has held 58 congresses to date, 38 of which are ordinary, gathered on Sunday under the slogan “The will is the people’s.” Özel has at least one rival in the election, but “people’s will,” the party referenced ironically, converged around Imamoğlu when the party nominated him as the only candidate for a race in the CHP to pick its future presidential candidate.
Although it boasts intraparty democracy where former and current members shun any direct criticism of the incumbent leader, the CHP barely found itself a place in Türkiye’s democratic history after it lost the country’s first genuinely democratic, multiparty election in 1950. Despite being the second biggest party of the country, the CHP has repeatedly lost to the incumbent ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) in past two decades and before that, rose to power briefly after the 1960 coup it supported and in early 1990s under the SHP led by Erdal Inönü, son of Ismet İnönü, the party’s only leader to win a general election. All these election victories, however, led to the establishment of coalition governments. Still, it surpasses the AK Party as the longest-governing party of the country due to remaining uncontested in the first years of the republic, from 1923 to 1946, the year of the first multiparty election, overshadowed by allegations of corruption in favor of the CHP.
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