Piotr Zalewski
speaker
50 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 29 Jul
Piotr Zalewski’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
At a stroke, Özel has redrawn Turkey's political map.
Piotr Zelebski is our Turkey correspondent.
At least 91 MPs from the Republican People's Party, or CHP,
the party Özel headed until May, have defected to his new party already, making it the second biggest in parliament.
The CHP had been Turkey's biggest opposition party since 2002.
That honor now belongs to the new party.
Polls suggest Ozel has taken with him not only CHP grantees, but its voters as well.
Some put support for the new party at over 30% ahead of Erdogan's Justice and Development Party.
Erdogan and his Justice and Development, or AK Party, have led Turkey for the past quarter century.
They swept to power in 2002, with Erdogan becoming Prime Minister in 2003 and President in 2014.
The CHP had been, until the emergence of the new party, the country's main opposition from that very moment, meaning from 2002 onwards.
Erdogan has already extended his time in office once through constitutional changes he pushed through in 2017.
This time around, to give himself a shot at another term, he is widely expected to ask Parliament to bring forward the coming presidential elections, officially scheduled for 2028,
to next year.
And the courts have already begun paving the path to another term in office for Turkey's leader or his successor, should Erdogan, who turns 73 next year, be unable to run.
The man acknowledged by pollsters as the candidate best placed to take on Erdogan in the coming presidential elections, Ekrem İmamoğlu, was arrested in March of last year on trumped-up
corruption charges, and now faces roughly 2,300 years in prison.
Well, it remains to be seen whether the new party becomes a more effective opposition than the CHP.
For now, obviously, it has positioned itself as the main opposition to Erdogan's AK Party.
It's critical of Erdogan's concentration of power, but it's still unclear whether the new party can become more than a clone of the CHP, the party from which it broke away.
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