Devlet Bahçeli, chair of the government ally Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), hit out at the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which is pushing for a by-election ahead of the 2028 general election. Addressing the parliamentary group meeting of his party in the capital Ankara on Tuesday, Bahçeli said that the timetable was clear on the election. “We won’t allow different formulas, indirect ways, arbitrary plots,” he said.
Following a string of arrests of mayors of CHP-run municipalities on charges of corruption, the CHP has escalated calls for an early election. Its chair, Özgür Özel, challenged incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to hold the vote, apparently encouraged by the main opposition’s unprecedented success in the 2024 municipal elections. When he failed to garner support for an early election, Özel has now called for a by-election for the vacated seats in Parliament, believing that any success in that vote may pave the way for the early election the CHP has fervently urged.
Bahçeli stated that the relentless, ill-timed calls for elections are merely the "intrigues of the opposition." He asserted that those insisting on elections are speaking not out of concern for the nation’s troubles but out of their own anxieties.
"It is a futile effort for those who experience misplaced and untimely bursts of self-confidence and lose their sense of proportion to attempt to dictate Türkiye agenda. An election is not a toy to be put forward through political trickery or the instigation of artificial crises. It is already clear when the ballot box will be brought forward,” he said.
“We will not open stability up for debate, we will not compromise our peace for the sake of personal ambitions, and we will not sacrifice the national will to the politics of exploitation. Türkiye will continue on its path, and no one will be able to stop this march. Because this march is not that of a single party, but of a nation,” he added.
