Brave New whirl: Turkey’s opposition overhaul
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The Economist.
Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm Jason Palmer.
Today on the show, a surrogacy scandal continues to royal German politics and traditional career advice falls short for Gen Z. The Economist
First up, though.
Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has long claimed that his Justice and Development, or AK Party, deserved new opposition. Well, on Friday, he got his wish.
Today with our elected city presidents, tomorrow with our elected party assembly.
Ozgar Ozel had been leader of the Republican People's Party. But in May, he was shunted aside in suspicious circumstances. So he started a new party, called the New Party.
We are establishing it by taking the first step with our MPs who entrust it to him.
As an opening move, it's gone surprisingly well. Problem is, as recent history has shown again and again, Mr. Erdogan doesn't really want a credible opposition.
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.
So before we get into the new party, let's talk about how we got where we are. What's the backdrop in which all of this is happening?
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.
So in a sense, a more effective opposition party was needed? I mean, what is Mr. Ozil's plan here?
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. Now, the CHP is a secular, social, democratic party. For the new party to inherit the CHP base... will probably be relatively easy. And polls suggest this has happened already. What is going to be more difficult is for the new party to draw in voters from the center-right, to draw in some secular nationalists and some Kurdish voters.
How did Özgür Özel build the New Party and what immediate impact did it have on Turkey's parliament?
And it does not appear to have done so yet.
Well, I guess that's Mr. Ozil's job now that he's got this new party under him and all this momentum. But what do you expect from him? Who is he?
Well, Özal is not new to politics at all, had been a longtime member of the CHP before his resignation. He took over the party in 2023 after general elections that the CHP was expected to do well in, but in which it badly underperformed. He headed the CHP for three years until May, when he was deposed by court decree. His biggest achievement came in 2024 when the CHP prevailed over the AK Party in local elections en route to its best result in about half a century.
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