The main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) is too busy with itself nowadays, despite eyeing an early election victory. The party’s chair, Özgür Özel, highlighted abandoning the “harsh rhetoric” of the party and pursuing “normalization” during a meeting with the party’s senior cadres on Monday, the Sabah newspaper reported.
The CHP has rarely reached out to the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) despite a landmark “normalization” process between the two parties in the aftermath of the 2024 local elections that saw Özel meeting President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Erdoğan visiting the CHP's headquarters. On the contrary, it mounted a campaign for an early election, especially after the arrest of its mayors on charges of corruption last year. The idea of an early election was on the agenda of Monday’s meeting, according to the Sabah report. Özel told fellow CHP members that they would “force the government to early election.”
“We will win this time,” he reportedly said. The next election is scheduled for 2028 in the country, but Özel is confident of defeating the AK Party that governed the country for more than two decades.
As a matter of fact, Özel linked the CHP’s new phase to tone down harsh rhetoric with a planned election campaign.
“People don’t like those fighting each other,” he reportedly told CHP lawmakers, in reference to the current discourse the CHP has adhered to, blaming the government through remarks amounting to insults at times.
The CHP, however, has its own share of “fighters.” Another report by the Sabah newspaper says loyalists of Özel’s predecessor, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, complained to the former chair that Özel redesigned the party’s “DNA” and purged dissent. Although unconfirmed reports say Kılıçdaroğlu quit politics recently, two years after he lost an intraparty election to Özel, CHP members favoring him have appealed to Kılıçdaroğlu to start “a new movement,” possibly a new party. The Sabah report says Kılıçdaroğlu awaits the final verdict in a trial over the 2023 election where Özel is accused of buying votes to oust Kılıçdaroğlu. A lower court dismissed the case last year, but an appeals court ordered a retrial. A retrial may conclude with a verdict for “absolute nullification” of Özel’s chairpersonship, reinstating Kılıçdaroğlu as the chair of the CHP or at least, pave the way for his appointment as a trustee to the party in the absence of the Özel administration.
Özel made a major reshuffle within the party last November, in an apparent attempt to weed out the Kılıçdaroğlu supporters. Appointments of former members of right-wing parties to key posts angered Kılıçdaroğlu loyalists in Türkiye’s oldest party, which positions itself as a “social democrat” party.
