Courts as political actors

What is happening to Türkiye's Republican People's Party (CHP) may look like an internal party dispute. It is not. On 21 May 2026, the 36th Civil Chamber of the Ankara Regional Court of Appeal declared the party's November 2023 leadership congress null and void on grounds of 'absolute nullity' – a legal doctrine meaning irreversible invalidity – citing alleged delegate manipulation. The congress at which Özgür Özel had defeated his predecessor Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu was declared legally non-existent in its entirety, along with all decisions taken thereafter. CHP reinstated Kılıçdaroğlu. Police subsequently entered party headquarters with tear gas, evacuating Özel and party administrators by force.

Democracies no longer die through military coups. Instead, elected leaders use legal tools to erode institutions from within

The ruling illustrates, in concrete terms, how courts can become central actors in competitive authoritarian systems. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt showed that democracies no longer die through military coups. Instead, elected leaders use legal tools to erode institutions from within. Ergun Özbudun's Türkiye-specific analysis identifies the precise mechanism: a dependent judiciary becomes the primary instrument of informal repression in competitive authoritarian regimes, disciplining opposition without the visibility of direct state violence.

From this perspective, what Türkiye is experiencing is neither a historical anomaly nor a technical legal matter. The day before the ruling, the reinstated leader had called for the party's 'purification' from 'corruption and filth'. Adding another layer to an already complex legitimacy crisis, he framed his return not as judicial restoration but moral reckoning.

A party built on fracture

These vulnerabilities have deep roots. On 14 May 1950, CHP suffered an unexpected electoral defeat. The party that had ruled Türkiye as a single-party state since 1923 did not know how to be in opposition. The decade that followed was a story of survival under pressure and relentless factional conflict. This pattern would reproduce itself with remarkable durability across the following decades. The party's ideological identity never settled into a coherent line; persistent ambiguity made broadening its electoral base and sustaining internal cohesion structurally difficult.

The years after 2000 saw the rise of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's Justice and Development Party, AKP. At this point, CHP retreated into a defensive Kemalist posture, unable to expand beyond its core constituency. Kılıçdaroğlu's assumption of the leadership in 2010 failed to break this impasse. Erdoğan's 2012 remark – 'as long as this gentleman leads the CHP, our work is easy' – accurately forecasted the thirteen years that followed. At the 38th Congress, Kılıçdaroğlu competed against Özel, a close colleague he had trusted. He lost. The new leadership delivered an unexpected breakthrough: in the March 2024 local elections, CHP outpolled AKP by six percentage points. The party had won the largest opposition victory in Turkish electoral history.

Judicial intervention: pressure or procedure?

The May 2026 ruling did not arrive in isolation. Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, who many see as CHP's de facto presidential candidate for 2028 – was arrested on 23 March 2025, the same day the party formally declared him its candidate, on charges of corruption and aiding a terrorist organisation. He remains in pre-trial detention. The government has since detained dozens of CHP-affiliated mayors on similar charges. A lower court separately annulled the party's Istanbul provincial congress.

Erdoğan's government has detained Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, along with dozens of other CHP-affiliated mayors, on charges of corruption and aiding a terrorist organisation

Critics interpret this pattern as systematic judicial pressure on the opposition. The Turkish government maintains that the judiciary operates independently and that the investigations carry no political motivation; it also notes that the complaints and legal applications that initiated the case came from within the CHP itself. The picture is genuinely contested. Constitutional lawyers have long argued that disputes over internal party elections fall within the exclusive jurisdiction of the Supreme Electoral Council, not ordinary civil courts. This makes the procedural legitimacy of the ruling questionable regardless of its political motivation. That an MHP official initially posted – and then swiftly deleted – a message raising precisely this procedural objection illustrates how politically charged the legal debate has become.

Corruption allegations in CHP-run municipalities add a further layer of complexity. The crisis is not simply imposed from outside; intra-party machinations may also play a part. It is impossible to resolve one by pointing to the other.

A fractured party, an unreadable future

The annulment has left CHP facing three simultaneous crises. The first is the leadership crisis itself. Kılıçdaroğlu returned by court order but with contested legitimacy; Özel, backed by twelve metropolitan mayors, continued to assert effective authority. Control of headquarters, financial accounts and organisational structures became sites of active dispute.

For the opposition party CHP to field a unified, credible candidate within two years, it must first find a way out of a legal labyrinth

The second is ethical. CHP must simultaneously sustain a narrative of resistance to judicial interference while answering its own accountability questions. The third, and perhaps deepest, is the 2028 presidential election scenario. İmamoğlu remains in detention. For CHP to field a unified, credible candidate within two years, it must first find a way out of a legal labyrinth that shows no sign of simplifying.

Türkiye's democratic crisis

Türkiye's democratic process crisis did not begin with the CHP and will not end with it. But the May 2026 ruling marks a threshold at which the theoretical debate on democratic backsliding becomes a concrete country case. When courts can determine who leads an opposition party, the distinction between legal oversight and political control becomes dangerously thin.

Whether that line has been crossed in Turkey is still up for debate. What is no longer debatable is that the line itself is under pressure – and that the outcome will shape not only the 2028 election, but the longer question of what democratic competition in Turkey can still mean.

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