Republican People’s Party (CHP) Chair Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu returned to office three years after he lost an intra-party election. Four months into his reinstatement, the leader of the opposition juggernaut, which lost most of its lawmakers to the newly established New Party (YP), told journalists he would not “stay as chair for the duration of my lifetime.”
“I never said I would seek candidacy. I respect any candidate,” he said Sunday in Bolu, a northern city where senior CHP members went for a retreat to assess a future road map.
Kılıçdaroğlu was engaged in a bitter row with former CHP Chair Özgür Özel after the latter was removed from office by a court ruling over allegations that his associates were involved in vote-buying in the intra-party election that ended Kılıçdaroğlu’s lengthy reign in the party. After returning to his former post, Kılıçdaroğlu vowed to cleanse the party of corruption, referring to the arrests and detentions of a number of CHP mayors on charges of municipal corruption.
Kılıçdaroğlu said Sunday that he was intent on returning the CHP “to a safe harbor, to the values it had when it was founded.”
“The CHP has to preserve its moral values,” he said.
He underlined that the CHP was dragged into “a dirty process” and that politics paid the price.
“Confidence in politics is shaken. The CHP is a party that founded this state and had high moral values. But it distanced itself from these values,” he said. The CHP is Türkiye’s oldest party and was founded by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder and first president of the Republic of Türkiye.
Kılıçdaroğlu said the resignation of several members, namely those supporting Özel after he founded his New Party in July, had “accomplished, to a large extent, the cleansing task.”
The CHP now aims to hold a new intra-party election, and several figures have already announced their intention to run in a possible race.
