Fears have arisen that Turkey will slide further into authoritarianism after a court in Ankara ousted CHP (People's Republican Party) leader Ozgur Ozel from leadership last week, and replaced him with Kemal Kilicdaroglu as interim leader. This was justified by the court, which alleged that Ozel was the subject of several corruption cases, nullifying his position as head of the party's executive board despite being elected during the CHP's congress elections in 2023.
The crisis intensified on Sunday as riot police stormed the CHP's headquarters, firing tear gas and forcing their way into the building to evict Ozel.
Sunday's events saw a standoff between police officers and those inside the building, including Ozel, who shouted and threw objects as officers attempted to break through a makeshift barricade.
Ozel said that they were "under attack" amid the events. Hours later, he was seen in public, and in a video message posted on X, he vowed that the CHP would, from now on, be "on the streets, in the squares, marching towards power".
The events of last week spiralled further, as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan ordered the closure of the liberal-leaning Bilgi University, but withdrew the decree days later. Who is Ozgur Ozel? Ozel is a politician and pharmacist who was thrust into the limelight after the 2023 CHP internal elections, which ended Kemal Kilicdaroglu's years-long leadership.
Kilicdaroglu, who was CHP leader between 2010 and 2023, had failed to win any national elections, prompting Ozel's emergence as the party sought to challenge their failures.
Some within the CHP, however, had questioned Ozel's victory. At the same time, several of Kilicdaroglu's supporters accuse him of colluding with the arrested Istanbul mayor, Ekrem Imamoglu , to "pressure and incentivise delegates through networks linked to the Istanbul Municipality".
Following last week's events, the now-interim leader said the ruling "should not be an occasion for division, but an opportunity to unite".
Despite this, Ozel quickly transformed Turkey's main opposition party and led it to victory in the 2024 local elections, causing a major upset to Erdogan's leadership, and fears that this tenure could be over by the time Turkey elects a new president.
Ozel has come out in defiance against Erdogan, criticising him for Imamoglu's arrest in March last year.
He publicly backed Imamoglu throughout his arrest, which he called "a coup against our next president," and maintained that the charges brought against him, including corruption, bribery, and terrorism support, are "politically motivated".
The CHP is Turkey's main opposition party, and has been described as centre-left. It is the country's oldest, founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the modern Turkish Republic.
The events echo Imamoglu's March 2025 detention , and the political crisis that ensued as the ruling AK Party appeared to go to further lengths to oust high-profile opposition leaders from their positions.
Imamoglu, serving as Istanbul's mayor since 2019, has long been touted as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's main political rival in the run-up to the next presidential election, set for 2028. His arrest triggered Turkey's biggest wave of protests since the 2013 Gezi Park demonstrations. Following a trial, the Istanbul mayor was sentenced to over 2,000 years in prison in November 2025.
Since 2024, hundreds of party members and elected officials have been detained on corruption charges that the party rejects. Is this a further slide into authoritarianism? Speaking to The New Arab , academic Ezgi Basaran said the judicial removal of Ozel as CHP leader "sits within that sequence".
"We are seeing the ultimate weaponisation of the judiciary by the Erdogan regime , and competition among political parties and people is extremely controlled. The aim is to maintain the façade of elections in which parties can run, votes can be cast, and results can be revisited by courts whose independence has, over time, become largely formal. As we now see, who will run within the opposition is also being decided by Erdogan," she said.
"The CHP has been polling ahead of the AKP since the local elections of March 2024, in which the AKP lost all major cities to the CHP. Managing and shaping the main opposition party became a matter of survival for the Erdogan regime."
Basaran said Erdogan can use the internal disputes within the CHP, propelled by the judiciary ruling, to call for an early election on his own terms.
"With the CHP in internal disarray and its most prominent figures targeted or imprisoned, is an election the government calculates it can win?" she said.
Basaran said the ongoing crisis reflects the age of "impunity" that we live in, given the rise of authoritarian regimes that are still in power despite corruption allegations and the orchestration of wars, which has consequently amplified Erdogan to tighten his grip on power, as he seeks to extend his leadership of Turkey after being in power for over two decades.
"None of this happens in a vacuum. We are living through what can only be described as an age of impunity, in which the external checks that once gave authoritarian leaders some pause have been eroded or abandoned," she added. "When this is the prevailing international atmosphere, it is not surprising that Erdogan feels free to move in directions that Turkish democracy and its multiparty system have never experienced before. The threshold of what is tolerable has shifted, and leaders who watch these things carefully have drawn their own conclusions."
However, analyst Batu Coskun stressed that the current crisis is more of an internal conflict within the CHP rather than a confrontation orchestrated by Erdogan.
Nonetheless, he said the ongoing leadership crisis "undoubtedly benefits him politically".
"As electoral calculations begin to take shape, Erdogan appears comparatively advantaged," Coskun told The New Arab. "Persistent inflation continues to erode public confidence in the government, yet the AKP still projects an image of continuity, statecraft, and institutional stability. If the CHP crisis continues to alienate voters, Erdogan could regain further political ground ahead of future elections, particularly if momentum builds around the Kurdish peace process."
In a statement on Monday, Human Rights Watch described Ozel's ouster as "a deeply damaging blow to the rule of law, democracy and human rights" in the country, after over a decade of authoritarian moves, including media pressure, bans, and court rulings intended to weaken the opposition.
Benjamin Ward, HRW's deputy Europe and Central Asia director, stated that it was "clear that the Turkish authorities want to remove the current leadership of the CHP as a viable force in politics."