PolicyWatch 4107
September 22, 2025
The Turkish president has shown he will use harsh tactics to
suppress the popular opposition party, but his future decisions could
still be swayed by domestic protests, economic factors, and
geopolitics.
On September 15, a Turkish court postponed until October 24
its ruling on whether to nullify the November 2023
convention of the country’s main opposition Republican
People’s Party (CHP) based on fraud allegations. A ruling to
declare the convention “completely null and void” could pave
the way for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to
replace current CHP chair Ozgur Ozel with a handpicked
candidate. The court’s measured delay follows massive CHP-
led protests across Turkey in reaction to the case.
Turkey’s slide from democracy under Erdogan has been well
documented. According to Freedom House, Turkey—which
in 2010 was grouped with southeast European countries like
Albania on democratic freedoms—now finds itself in less
respectable company, including among Middle East states
like Iraq. Yet even considering this deterioration, Erdogan’s
full-scale charge against the country’s leading opposition
party—coupled with the March 19 arrest of Istanbul’s CHP
mayor and likely presidential candidate Ekrem Imamoglu—
stands out for its brazenness. Fundamental questions arise:
Why is Erdogan intensifying his crackdown now, what are his
goals and next steps, and will the CHP survive?
Erdogan has won fifteen nationwide votes—some of them
referendums—since becoming prime minister in 2003. The
strong economic growth he delivered after coming to power
allowed him to build a base of adoring supporters.
Meanwhile, an ineffective opposition led by the CHP, which
for nearly two decades was garnering just over 20 percent of
the vote, helped Erdogan greatly. But with Turkey’s economy
volatile since 2018, Turkey’s president has had to rely on his
control of election boards, state institutions, courts, and the
media to tilt the vote in his favor.
The entry into politics of Imamoglu, who won the Istanbul
mayoral race in 2019 and then again in 2024, has changed this
balance, with the CHP politician defeating the president’s
mayoral candidates despite the advantages afforded by
Erdogan’s incumbency. Imamoglu, a charismatic and
relatable social democratic politician, has built a broad
coalition of voters surpassing Erdogan’s. Following his
sweeping win in 2024, the mayor started to signal that he
would run against Erdogan in the next presidential election—
the suspected reason for his March arrest. Now Imamoglu—
who was indicted on charges ranging from money laundering
to mismanagement of contracts, based on testimony by
anonymous witnesses—will undoubtedly remain in some
form of legal custody so long as Erdogan is president.
The mayor’s arrest hardly solves the president’s bigger “CHP
problem”—i.e., a formidable comeback by an opposition
party that looked moribund only a few years ago. As the
party of Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the CHP
in the twentieth century embraced secularism, a strict
separation between politics and Islam. In the 1970s, under
charismatic leader Bulent Ecevit, it also adopted a social
democratic and pro–working class identity. The party’s
popularity nosedived during the 1990s, however, due to
ineffective leadership, abandonment of its working-class base,
and the loss of nationalist voters to other parties.
The CHP has made a comeback in recent years for the
following reasons:
- Imamoglu has reconnected the CHP to lower-middle-
- class and working-class voters, restoring a crucial
- component of the party’s historic brand from Istanbul,
- the country’s largest city and its financial and
- manufacturing hub.
- Ankara Mayor Mansur Yavas, who boasts a Turkish nationalist pedigree, has restored the party’s nationalist credentials from Turkey’s capital city and second-largest metropolitan area, located in the Anatolian heartland.
- Party chair Ozgur Ozel, who hails from Manisa, a province abutting Izmir, Turkey’s third-largest and most secularist metropolitan area, has revitalized the CHP by bringing its three ideological wings—secularist, Turkish nationalist, and social democratic—under unified leadership.
- Finally, CHP mayors, holding power in the country’s key metropolitan areas since 2019, have proved themselves to be good public administrators, launching key metro and public transportation connections, expanding culture and welfare programs, and making the CHP the party of good governance in the eyes of the voters.
These developments together have convinced voters for the
first time since 2003 that the CHP can run Turkey well, and
better than Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP).
Consequently, the CHP has been leading the AKP in opinion
polls since 2024, when it first trounced the party in
nationwide municipal and local contests.
The CHP in its entirety has emerged as a serious political
threat to Erdogan. Accordingly, he will continue seeking to
suppress the party, drawing on his control of the courts,
national institutions, and the media.
Prosecutors will likely launch additional cases against CHP
mayors and other officials, with the courts continuing to sack
and jail them and find replacements from within the party’s
opposing wings in order to stoke internal party strife. The
courts will also intentionally keep cases against the CHP and
its leaders open-ended, a situation that applies especially to
Imamoglu. Erdogan believes that time is on his side, and he
has proven that he can shape the media narrative regarding
court cases. Massive demonstrations protesting Imamoglu’s
arrest in March have since diminished, and the CHP’s polling
lead against the AKP has narrowed, giving some credence to
the president’s belief that time is his best ally against the CHP.
Erdogan will undoubtedly keep working to wear down the
CHP, but the extent of his measures remains open to
speculation, as does the resilience of Turkish democracy and
the country’s oldest political party. Some possible outcomes
are:
Effective CHP civil war. Erdogan would like to see the CHP
deplete its time and energy on unending court cases and for
party factions to fall prey to infighting. In this ideal scenario
for Erdogan, internal strife would make the party appear
chaotic—and, once again, unfit to govern—allowing the AKP
to restore its lead in the polls.
CHP resilience. After a period of chaos, CHP factions could
again unite under the greater party banner. Considering the
toxicity of party officials potentially selected by the courts,
and notwithstanding a possible CHP civil war in the short
term, such a scenario appears plausible in the middle to long
term.
Near police state. A third possible outcome, which could
coexist with either of the first two, would be a deeper
crackdown against the CHP that sparked larger and persistent
mass protests. Amid the authoritarian response, Turkey
would begin to resemble a police state, with long-term bans
on freedom of expression, assembly, association, and media.
In this scenario, Erdogan might even consider postponing
elections, especially if the country’s economy does not recover
before the next presidential vote.
Battle of attrition. Predicting Erdogan’s likely next steps
requires consideration of structural dynamics—but also of the
president’s limitations. Working against him are several
factors:
- The size of Turkey’s middle class, which largely backs the CHP.
- The extent of its civil society organizations, many of which sustain the opposition.
- The age and agility of its institutions—e.g., the CHP is more than a hundred years old.
- Deep cultural and political ties to Europe.
- Perhaps most important, Turkey’s complete integration into global markets, which can react to events in ways Erdogan cannot control.
The Ankara court’s decision to delay its verdict concerning
the CHP and its chair appears to be rooted as much in fear of
larger protests as in negative reaction by the markets.
Erdogan cannot shut down the CHP unless he chooses to turn
Turkey into a complete police state, a development that will
almost certainly ruin the country’s economy.
With surveys showing that nearly two-thirds of Turkish
respondents believe Imamoglu has been jailed for political
reasons, the struggle between Erdogan and the CHP remains
far from resolved. Ultimately, Turkey’s citizens will be pivotal
in deciding the country’s future leadership.
For their part, successive U.S. administrations—Democratic
and Republican alike—have prioritized America’s strategic
relationship with Turkey, a key NATO ally, despite the
country’s democratic backsliding. The Trump administration
could continue such a policy, mindful of Turkey’s status as a
rising middle power in the current era of great power
competition.
However the U.S. government proceeds, it should closely
monitor Turkey’s domestic developments, given their
potential impact on Ankara’s foreign policy. A decisive CHP
surge could result in Erdogan reverting to nationalist politics
to boost his base, such as on the Kurdish issue, including by
renewing Ankara’s hardline stance toward U.S. cooperation
with the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces in
Syria. In another scenario, Erdogan might close ranks with the
Trump administration on Syria as well as other regional and
global issues to burnish his strongman image,
while simultaneously cracking down on the CHP.
Soner Cagaptay is the Beyer Family Senior Fellow at The
Washington Institute and director of its Turkish Research Program.
THE WASHINGTON INSTITUTE FOR NEAR EAST POLICY
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