It has become almost a cliché to say that Turkey has crossed yet another authoritarian threshold. But the ruling by an Ankara appeals court on May 21 may prove to be genuinely different.
The court annulled the 2023 congress of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), Turkey’s main opposition. Citing alleged vote-buying among delegates, the judges suspended the party’s leadership and ordered the reinstatement of former leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu. Coming after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu —the CHP’s presidential candidate for 2028—and months of mounting pressure on CHP-run municipalities, the decision marks another major escalation in the government’s campaign against the party.
The ruling itself exceeds the court’s legal authority. Yet what makes it significant is not simply that the state has intervened in the opposition, nor that the rule of law has been violated in the process. Turkey has a long history of judicial intervention in politics, including the closure of opposition parties, and the past decade alone has produced many rulings that strain or ignore constitutional limits.
What is new is the aim. Previous measures sought to weaken, intimidate, or remove opposition actors. This one seeks to reshape the opposition itself.
Turkey’s authoritarian descent has blown by many milestones over the past decade: the post-2016 purges; the imprisonment of prominent politicians such as Selahattin Demirtas, then a co-leader of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP); the systematic takeover of municipalities run by pro-Kurdish parties; the prosecution of CHP mayors; and the jailing of Imamoglu. Each drew warnings that Turkey had crossed a point of no return. But all of these, however damaging, shared a common logic: They were about repressing the opposition—disabling actors, constraining the institutions, and narrowing the space within which opposition could operate.
The sharpest version of that logic was the imprisonment of Imamoglu in March 2025. By jailing the figure most likely to defeat him in the next presidential race, Erdogan made clear that he was no longer content to make opposition difficult; he wanted to ensure that no credible rival could win. That was a threshold of its own.
The May 21 ruling goes beyond even that. The target is no longer an individual, a mayor, or a municipality. It is the party itself, the institutional vehicle through which any future challenge to Erdogan would have to be mounted.
The regime had experimented with such tactics before. In 2016, when Devlet Bahceli faced an internal challenge inside the far-right Nationalist Movement Party, a sequence of court rulings blocked a planned extraordinary congress and protected his leadership. The party soon entered an alliance with the government.
Such interventions are even more pernicious than party closures, which have been a regular feature of Turkish politics. From the Welfare Party, banned in 1998, to a long line of Kurdish parties (the People’s Labor Party, Democracy Party, People’s Democracy Party, Democratic Society Party, and the HDP), the Turkish state has repeatedly used the courts to shut political movements down.
But this is a blunt instrument. The movement behind a banned party usually reemerges under a new name, with the same cadres and the same voters. Welfare became the Virtue Party, and Virtue gave rise to both the Felicity Party and Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP). Kurdish parties have reappeared again and again. Banned parties also tend to acquire the political capital of victimhood, which can make them stronger in their next incarnation than they were before.
With the May 21 ruling, the CHP nominally remains intact. Its name, its parliamentary group, its hundreds of municipalities, its members, and its voters all remain in place. What has changed is who runs it. And the political meaning of that change is clear: The leadership that now-ousted CHP head Ozgur Ozel has built since 2023—more combative and electorally successful—has been removed by judicial order, while the leadership that Erdogan spent years describing as harmless has been restored to its place.
As long ago as 2012, when Kilicdaroglu had recently been chosen as the new head of the CHP, Erdogan wrote on Twitter that “as long as this gentleman is at the head of the CHP, our work is easy.” The forecast proved accurate. Over a 13-year tenure as CHP leader, Kilicdaroglu—uncharismatic and politically inept—never managed to challenge Erdogan effectively. Even in 2023, under conditions that gave the opposition its best chance in years, he ran as the joint opposition candidate and lost.
All of that changed in late 2023. Ozel defeated Kilicdaroglu at the November congress, and the CHP rapidly recovered its political footing. In March 2024 municipal elections, it finished first in a nationwide vote for the first time since 1977. It was after this electoral revival that the heaviest waves of state pressure followed: the prosecution of CHP mayors; the appointment of trustees to CHP-run municipalities, a practice previously confined to those run by pro-Kurdish parties; and, in March 2025, the imprisonment of Imamoglu.
Yet none of this broke the party. Opinion polls continued to show the CHP running neck and neck with the AKP. Repression had reached its limits, and closing the party would only generate a sense of martyrdom.
Here, a captured opposition serves Erdogan’s goals perfectly. Under Kilicdaroglu, the CHP will presumably continue to contest elections, occupy parliamentary seats, and supply the regime with visible evidence of political pluralism. It offers the appearance of competition without the substance of it.
In April, Erdogan announced that Turkish democracy would soon attain “the kind of main opposition it deserves.” A month later, the court delivered it. The only question now is this: Will this play out the way that Erdogan hopes?
In the days that followed the ruling, Ozel and his team had two broad options. The first was to negotiate with Kilicdaroglu, remain inside the party, and force a swift extraordinary congress to retake the leadership through a vote. The second was to refuse the ruling outright and continue running the party in defiance of the imposed leadership. Ozel initially tried both at once: He opened lines of communication with Kilicdaroglu while occupying the party’s central headquarters.
Kilicdaroglu’s response was to have the police forcibly clear the building and signal that no early congress was forthcoming. The path of internal accommodation was closed. What Ozel still has is the loyalty of the CHP’s voters, the overwhelming majority of whom side with him and view Kilicdaroglu’s return as a regime-imposed restoration. But voter support alone cannot substitute for an institutional vehicle.
A final option remains: founding a new party. On paper, the obstacles are familiar ones—funding, organization, and building a network of provincial branches. In ordinary circumstances, they are difficult but manageable. What makes them prohibitive today is the reach of state pressure toward the private actors who would have to support such a project: Even landlords would be reluctant to rent premises for fear of government retaliation. New parties in Turkey rarely succeed under normal conditions, where loyalty to existing parties runs deep; the current conditions are far from normal.
Ozel himself faces an additional risk: a parliamentary file requesting the lifting of his immunity is already pending. Breaking from the CHP would expose him to prosecution without the political shield that the position still affords. For all these reasons, a new party is a last resort—an option that Ozel is unlikely to pursue unless every other path is closed.
In the meantime, the ruling’s most immediate effect is parliamentary. A bloc of CHP deputies—those most closely tied to Kilicdaroglu—is likely to side with the reinstated leadership. Their votes could bring the government within reach of the supermajority required for constitutional amendments, including provisions that would allow Erdogan to run for another term.
Long-term consequences matter more. Erdogan’s authority has rested for a decade less on his own popularity than on the opposition’s inability to consolidate against him. Even in 2023, against a candidate as weak as Kilicdaroglu, he won by a margin that was too close for his comfort. Now, as Erdogan ages, he is trying to build a political architecture that he can pass on to a designated successor. Increasingly, that appears to be where the real contest will occur.
The May 21 ruling will further erode Erdogan’s already dwindling electoral legitimacy. He is betting that this won’t matter much. At home, the calculation is that committed opposition voters are already lost to him, but middle-of-the-road voters will be happy with the continued veneer of multiparty politics.
Abroad, Erdogan assumes that abandoning democracy won’t carry any consequences for Turkey’s formal Western affiliations. The U.S. president is openly sympathetic to authoritarian leaders, while the European Union treats Turkey primarily as an external partner on migration and security. Shared values have been losing weight as a principle in international relations more broadly, and they have long ceased to anchor Turkey’s relations with the West in particular. Furthermore, Turkey’s authoritarian drift is already treated as an established fact. Western governments know what they are dealing with and proceed anyway.
The sad reality is that the ruling will only matter for the dwindling constituency of people who care about Turkish democracy—which is precisely what makes it possible.
