San Francisco Frontiers - Court ousts leadership of Turkey's main opposition party

The move is the latest in a string of legal moves targeting Turkey's oldest party that won a huge victory over President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's ruling AKP in the 2024 local elections and has been rising in the polls.

The ruling overturns the result of the leadership election that brought in current party head Ozgur Ozel -- and ordered that the party's former longterm chair, Kemal Kilicdaroglu -- who lost the election to Ozel -- take over as interim leader.

In response, the party called an emergency meeting of its senior leadership at its Ankara headquarters, where hundreds of flag waving activists stood shouting defiant slogans, an AFP photographer said.

The news prompted Istanbul's BIST 100, Turkey's main stock exchange, to fall by more than six percent.

The case concerns allegations of vote buying at the CHP congress in November 2023, with prosecutors alleging that Ozel secured his own election through putting pressure on certain delegates with promises of jobs and other kickbacks.

In February 2025, the Ankara public prosecutor opened an investigation into allegations of vote buying at the congress, but the case was thrown out in October on grounds it had no substance.

But prosecutors appealed the ruling, with the court finding in their favour.

"We will not give in!" Ozel pledged on X shortly after the ruling, vowing to continue the struggle with "honour, dignity and courage".

Last year, Kilicdaroglu said he would be willing to take on the party leadership again if the court overturned the primary result, sparking uproar within the CHP.

Critics say the vote-buying case was one of a string of politically motivated attempts to put pressure on the CHP and hobble it as an opposition force.

- New era under Ozel -

The CHP has resolutely denied all the charges, accusing the government of using the judiciary to carry out a "political coup".

Former party leader Kilicdaroglu, now 77, was a lacklustre politician who chalked up a string of electoral defeats and barely made any dents in the armour of Erdogan's AKP.

He was ousted at the party congress five months after losing a bitterly-fought presidential campaign against Erdogan that was widely seen as the most important vote in generations, leaving the party in crisis.

But things changed after Ozel was elected.

Within months, he led the CHP to a resounding local election victory that was a bitter blow to Erdogan and his party.

Ozel later became the face of 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 Imamoglu.

Imamoglu, who was widely seen as one of the only politicians capable of beating Erdogan at the ballot box, was jailed on the day that he was named CHP's candidate for the 2028 presidential race.

The 54-year-old is 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 March 9 in which prosecutors want him jailed for 2,430 years.

Should Imamoglu be barred from running, political observers expect Ozel, 51, to emerge as the likely candidate for the presidential race.

I.Sanders--SFF