[OPINION] Fear of the ballot box: The deep irony of Turkish politics

Doğan Ertuğrul*

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has now effectively placed his former rival Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, whom he mocked for years as the “general manager of the CHP,” at the head of Turkey’s largest opposition party.

And “placed” is the right word here.

After leading the Republican People’s Party (CHP) for 13 years, Kılıçdaroğlu lost the party leadership to Özgür Özel at the party’s 2023 congress. Yet he did not return through a new congress or a democratic vote. He returned through a court decision.

And not even through a court that actually had jurisdiction over the matter. Alleged irregularities at the CHP congress should have been examined by the Supreme Election Council, the only authority empowered to rule on electoral disputes in Turkey. Instead, the 36th Civil Chamber of the Ankara Regional Court of Justice, a regional appeals court, issued the ruling.

The court not only declared the congress at which Özel was elected “absolutely null and void.” It also suspended the elected CHP leadership through an interim measure and put Kılıçdaroğlu back in the chairman’s seat.

The very politician Erdoğan had publicly ridiculed and humiliated for years as “Mr. Kemal” was returned to power through the courts.

And all of this happened, as the Turkish saying goes, before the eyes of the world.

Let us call things by their proper name: Narrow legal debates about this process miss the point entirely. Anyone who sees this merely as a legal dispute is already viewing events through the lens the Erdoğan government wants the public to adopt.

It is also misleading to portray Kılıçdaroğlu’s return simply as an internal CHP power struggle or party crisis.

So what is actually happening here?

Why did Erdoğan bring Kılıçdaroğlu back to the head of the CHP like a state-appointed trustee?

The answer is neither secret nor hard to understand. On the evening of the ruling, Özel said in front of the television cameras: “This is happening because we made the CHP the largest party in Turkey in the last election. Because we have a candidate, Ekrem İmamoğlu, who would defeat Erdoğan in the next election. And because we refuse to practice opposition politics on Erdoğan’s and the AKP’s terms, to become His Majesty’s opposition.”

Rarely have political pressure and the workings of state power been expressed this openly. And hardly anyone in Turkey doubts that this pressure is real.

The Turkish public knows Erdoğan and his system well enough by now.

One should not forget: After İstanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, who had been declared the CHP’s presidential candidate with more than 25 million signatures of support, said, “They want to bury me alive in the prison of Silivri,” Özel also stated publicly:

“They are telling me: If you want to remain party leader, forget İmamoğlu there. Rather than doing that, I would prefer to be in the cell next to him.”

These statements, too, were made publicly. In full view of the country.

What does this mean in practice?

Erdoğan, whose greatest political strength for years was his claim to legitimacy through elections, had his strongest rival jailed on charges ranging from corruption and organized crime to espionage. İmamoğlu is a politician who, according to nearly every opinion poll, would likely defeat him at the ballot box.

Afterward, the leadership of the opposition party that nominated İmamoğlu was effectively replaced with a politically preferred figure.

That is what happened.

The ongoing corruption investigations targeting CHP-run municipalities, regardless of whether the accusations are valid, currently serve above all to create the impression of internal party infighting and to obscure the political intervention itself.

Which brings us to the key question: Why did Erdoğan choose this path?

Some political analysts argue that everything in Turkey is unfolding according to Erdoğan’s plan. In their view, Erdoğan is the sole political game-maker and deliberately chose this route as a show of force, despite having other options. The ultimate goal, they argue, is to consolidate the regime while the opposition remains powerless to stop it.

I believe this interpretation is too simplistic.

Yes, Erdoğan enjoys displays of power. That is no secret. But imprisoning the opposition’s strongest presidential contender and effectively placing the largest opposition party under political trusteeship may reflect not strength, but insecurity.

One thing seems clear: If Erdoğan truly believed he could defeat İmamoğlu at the ballot box, or persuade the CHP to return to the role of a controlled system opposition, he probably would not have taken such a risky political step.

In that case, “His Majesty’s opposition” would have been enough to stabilize his presidential system.

The claim that the opposition can no longer do anything against the government is equally questionable. After all, this has long been Erdoğan’s central message: “Nothing will come out of this opposition anyway.”

Yet as former prime minister Süleyman Demirel once put it, politics is the art of creating possibilities. And every political move creates the possibility of a countermove.

There is no doubt that the Turkish opposition’s political space has been drastically narrowed since the failed coup of July 15, 2016. State institutions, the judiciary, the media and large parts of civil society are now under severe pressure or direct government control.

At the same time, it is equally clear that the government has failed to fully consolidate society behind itself. On the contrary, social opposition continues to grow, from conservative-Islamist and nationalist circles to secular, leftist and Kurdish voters.

Under such a system, classical instruments of parliamentary opposition inevitably become weaker. But political space does not exist only in party headquarters and parliaments. And no government can permanently suppress social mobilization without eventually resorting to open and large-scale violence.

That is precisely what Erdoğan and his power apparatus fear.

This is why Erdoğan and his key ally, Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) leader Devlet Bahçeli, accuse the opposition in nearly every speech of “trying to incite street protests,” often while issuing open threats.

It is also no coincidence that pro-government circles rarely discuss the example of Hungary. And when they do, the conversation almost always begins with the phrase, “Turkey is not Hungary.”

If Erdoğan succeeds with this operation as well, if he manages to break the resistance of both the CHP and İmamoğlu and once again paralyze the opposition politically, Turkey will move one decisive step closer to a system without genuine elections and without an effective opposition.

Even today, the possibility of a democratic transfer of power in Turkey hangs by a thread.

The only real source of hope at the moment is that neither İmamoğlu nor the broader social opposition has been broken despite all the pressure.

Whether that remains the case, only time will tell.

Leaderless movements have their weaknesses. But they also possess a strength of their own.

*Doğan Ertuğrul is a journalist and Middle East expert. He worked as a foreign correspondent in Bulgaria, Bosnia, Greece and Cyprus from 1994 to 2000.

He also worked for Aktüel and Tempo, two Turkish current affairs magazines, where he covered Kurdish matters and the Middle East and traveled to both Iran and northern Iraq as part of that reporting. He lived and worked in Lebanon from 2012 to 2014.

He has written for various newspapers on Iran’s political system and regional relations. He also edited the books “Doğunun Kadın Mirası” (The Heritage of the Women of the East) and “Doğulu Yazarlar Gözüyle İstanbul” (Istanbul in the Eyes of Eastern Writers).

Ertuğrul currently lives and works in Europe.