The “climate change” in Turkish politics following the March 31 municipal elections is expected to take another turn with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s anticipated visit to the headquarters of his party’s main rival.
Abdullah Güler, who heads a parliamentary group of Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AK Party), said on Sunday that the visit will likely take place in the first week of June, after a convention of the AK Party where members will evaluate the future following the elections.
Erdoğan received Özgür Özel, head of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), at AK Party headquarters earlier this month. The meeting, held in a warm atmosphere, was the product of what Erdoğan called a “softening” approach in Turkish politics, where the CHP outdid the AK Party in several strongholds of the latter. The two men agreed on another meeting, this time at CHP headquarters.
Güler told broadcaster Kanal 7 on Sunday that they hoped there would be more meetings between the CHP and the AK Party. The two parties battled for more than two decades to win the hearts of the voters and the AK Party emerged victorious in almost all elections against the CHP, which currently stands as Türkiye’s second biggest party. The CHP, the oldest party in the country, allied with other parties in last year’s presidential elections but lost to Erdoğan and the AK Party. After the 2023 vote, Özel replaced Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu as the party’s leader and for the first time, it secured wins without a formal alliance with other opposition parties.
Güler says society has been “polarized in a way” and that turning every issue into a point of tension blurred the facts. “You end up as polar opposites when the ground for dialogue is lost. We experienced this in the past. The opposition had different approaches. Today, we can move forward with dialogue,” he said. He said parties certainly have different ideas, but talking to each other on common ground was important. Güler added that they already had dialogue with other parties, but it was important that this dialogue was embraced by society. Under Erdoğan, the AK Party hopes to adopt a new constitution through dialogue between parties. Parliamentary Speaker Numan Kurtulmuş recently made rounds for talks with all parties to advance the issue of drafting the new constitution that will replace the existing one inherited from the military junta of the 1980s.
