A court in Turkey annulled the 2023 leadership election of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) on Thursday, state news agency Anadolu Agency reported, in a sharp escalation against the country’s embattled opposition.
The ruling overturns the result of the leadership election that brought in current party head Özgür Özel and ordered that the party’s former long-term chair, Kemal Kılıcdaroglu, who lost the election to Özel, take over as interim leader.
In response, the party urged its senior membership to gather at its Ankara headquarters.
The news prompted Istanbul’s BIST 100, Turkey’s main stock exchange, to fall by more than 6%.
The case concerns allegations of vote buying at the CHP congress in November 2023, with prosecutors alleging that Özel secured his own election through putting pressure on certain delegates with promises of jobs and other kickbacks.
In October, an Ankara court had thrown out an earlier vote buying case over that election on grounds that it had no substance, but prosecutors appealed the ruling, with the court finding in their favour.
Critics say the vote-buying case is a politically motivated attempt to undermine Turkey’s oldest political party, which won a huge victory over President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s ruling AK Party in 2024 local elections and has been rising in the polls.
The CHP has resolutely denied all the charges, accusing the government of using the judiciary to carry out a “political coup.”
Former party leader Kılıcdaroglu, now 77, was a lacklustre politician who chalked up a string of electoral defeats and barely made any dents in the armour of Erdoğan’s AKP.
After Özel took over, he led the CHP within months to a resounding local election victory.
He later became the face of the Turkey’s biggest street protests in a decade which were triggered in March last year by the arrest and jailing of its presidential candidate, Istanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu.
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Widely seen as one of the only politicians capable of beating Erdogan at the ballot box, İmamoğlu is currently battling an array of legal cases alleging everything from graft to espionage and terror ties, charges which he insists are politically motivated.
He is currently on trial for espionage in a case that is running in parallel to a sweeping graft case which opened on 9 March in which prosecutors want him jailed for 2,430 years.
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