Is Turkey sinking further into authoritarianism after a new crisis?

Fears have emerged that Turkey is sliding further into authoritarianism after an Ankara court ousted CHP (Republican People’s Party) leader Ozgur Ozel from leadership last week and replaced him with Kemal Kilicdaroglu as interim leader.

This was justified by the court, which alleged that Ozel was the subject of several corruption cases, voiding his position as head of the party’s executive council despite his election in the 2023 CHP congress elections.

The crisis escalated Sunday when riot police stormed the CHP headquarters, firing tear gas and forcing their way into the building to remove Ozel.

Sunday’s events were marked by a confrontation between police and people inside the building, including Ozel, who shouted and threw objects as police tried to break through a makeshift barricade.

Ozel said they were “attacked” amid the events. A few hours later, he was seen in public and, in a video message posted on X, he vowed that the CHP would now be “in the streets, in the squares, marching towards power.”

Last week’s events worsened further when President Recep Tayyip Erdogan ordered the closure of the liberal-leaning Bilgi University, but withdrew the decree days later.

Who is Ozgur Ozel?

Ozel is a politician and pharmacist who was thrust into the spotlight after the 2023 CHP internal elections, which ended Kemal Kilicdaroglu’s years of leadership.

Kilicdaroglu, who led the CHP between 2010 and 2023, failed to win a single national election, prompting the emergence of Ozel as the party sought to challenge its failures.

Some within the CHP, however, had questioned Ozel’s victory. At the same time, several of Kilicdaroglu’s supporters accuse him of colluding with the arrested Istanbul mayor, Ekrem Imamoglu, to “pressure and incite delegates through networks linked to the Istanbul municipality.”

Following last week’s events, the now-acting leader said the decision “should not be an opportunity for division, but an opportunity for unity.”

Despite this, Ozel quickly transformed Turkey’s main opposition party and led it to victory in 2024 local elections, sparking major upheaval within Erdogan’s leadership, and fears that this term will be over by the time Turkey elects a new president.

Ozel spoke out against Erdogan, criticizing him for the arrest of Imamoglu in March last year.

He publicly supported Imamoglu throughout his arrest, which he called a “coup against our next president”, and maintained that the accusations against him, including corruption, bribery and supporting terrorism, were “politically motivated”.

The CHP is Turkey’s main opposition party and has been described as center-left. It is the oldest in the country, founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the modern Turkish Republic.

These events echo Imamoglu’s detention in March 2025 and the political crisis that followed when the ruling AKP party appeared to go further to oust prominent opposition leaders from their posts.

Imamoglu, mayor of Istanbul since 2019, has long been touted as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s main political rival in the run-up to the next presidential election, scheduled for 2028. His arrest sparked the largest wave of protests in Turkey since the Gezi Park protests in 2013. Following a trial, the Istanbul mayor was sentenced to more than 2,000 years in prison in November 2025.

Since 2024, hundreds of party members and elected officials have been arrested on corruption charges that the party rejects.

Is this a new slide towards authoritarianism?

Talk to The new Arabicscholar Ezgi Basaran said Ozel’s judicial removal as CHP leader “is part of this sequence.”

“We are witnessing an ultimate militarization of the judiciary by the Erdogan regime, and competition between political parties and the population is extremely controlled. The goal is to maintain the facade of elections in which parties can run, votes can be cast, and results can be reviewed by courts whose independence has become, over time, largely formal. As we now see, who will run in the opposition is also decided by Erdogan,” she said declared.

“The CHP has been ahead of the AKP in the polls since the March 2024 local elections, in which the AKP lost all major cities to the CHP. Managing and shaping the main opposition party has become a matter of survival for the Erdogan regime.”

Basaran said Erdogan could use internal conflicts within the CHP, caused by the court ruling, to call for early elections on his own terms.

“With the CHP in internal disarray and its most prominent figures targeted or imprisoned, does the government believe it can win an election?” she said.

Basaran said the current crisis reflects the era of “impunity” we live in, given the rise of authoritarian regimes that are still in power despite allegations of corruption and orchestration of wars, which has consequently amplified Erdogan to tighten his grip on power, as he seeks to extend his leadership over Turkey after more than two decades in power.

“None of this is happening in a vacuum. We are living in what can only be described as an era of impunity, in which the external controls that once gave authoritarian leaders some respite have been eroded or abandoned,” she added. “In the current international context, it is not surprising that Erdogan feels free to move in directions that Turkish democracy and its multi-party system have never experienced before. The threshold of what is tolerable has changed and the leaders who carefully monitor these things have drawn their own conclusions.”

However, analyst Batu Coskun stressed that the current crisis is more of an internal conflict within the CHP than a confrontation orchestrated by Erdogan.

Nonetheless, he said the current leadership crisis “undoubtedly benefits him politically.”

“As the electoral calculations begin to take shape, Erdogan appears relatively advantaged,” Coskun said. The new Arabic. “Persistent inflation continues to erode public trust in government, but the AKP still projects an image of continuity, statesmanship and institutional stability. If the CHP crisis continues to alienate voters, Erdogan could regain political ground before the next election, particularly if momentum builds around the Kurdish peace process.”

In a statement Monday, Human Rights Watch described Ozel’s ouster as “a profoundly damaging blow to the rule of law, democracy, and human rights” in the country, following more than a decade of authoritarian measures, including media pressure, bans, and court rulings designed to weaken the opposition.

Benjamin Ward, HRW’s deputy director for Europe and Central Asia, said it was “clear that Turkish authorities want to eliminate the current CHP leadership as a viable political force.”