By Daren Butler
ISTANBUL (Reuters) -Turkey’s main opposition party has seen hundreds of its members arrested in a nearly year-long legal onslaught that will reach a critical point on Monday when a court decides whether to annul the party’s last congress and unseat its leader.
The Ankara court’s decision on whether to invalidate the 2023 congress of the Republican People’s Party (CHP) over alleged procedural irregularities could reshape the party, rattle financial markets and even influence the timing of a general election set for 2028.
WHAT IS THE CRACKDOWN ABOUT?
The court case is part of an extensive, year-long crackdown on the party over corruption allegations, which the CHP says is politically motivated and aimed at destabilising the party of modern Turkey’s secularist founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
The government says the judiciary is independent and denies political motives for the investigations into what President Tayyip Erdogan has described as a corrupt network resembling “an octopus whose arms stretch to other parts of Turkey and abroad”.
Under the investigations, Turkey has detained more than 500 people, including 16 mayors over the last year in Istanbul and other CHP-run municipalities, according to a Reuters review.
The CHP denies all the corruption allegations and calls them an attempt to eliminate a democratic alternative for Turks, a charge the government rejects.
Istanbul’s CHP Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, Erdogan’s main political rival, has been the focus of attention so far. His jailing in March on corruption charges fuelled Turkey’s biggest protests in more than a decade and a sharp lira sell-off.
Now the CHP’s overall structure is in the spotlight.
The party’s Istanbul head was removed from office earlier this month after a court said delegates’ votes in an October 2023 CHP provincial congress were influenced by cash payments.
The court named former CHP deputy chair Gursel Tekin as interim provincial head. The CHP then expelled Tekin from the party and refused to meet him in a defiant response, giving a taste of what might follow Monday’s ruling.
WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?
The Ankara civil court on Monday could take similar steps regarding the CHP’s general congress in November 2023 in response to alleged vote buying and procedural irregularities.
At that congress, current CHP leader Ozgur Ozel replaced Kemal Kilicdaroglu, who was defeated by Erdogan in a presidential election earlier that year and who has lost the confidence of many CHP supporters.
The court could annul the general congress and appoint state trustees, or Kilicdaroglu, to run the party temporarily before a fresh party vote.
It could also dismiss the case or postpone any ruling for further review to await the outcome of a separate criminal court case on the congress, which has a hearing set for November 4.
The CHP plans an extraordinary congress for September 21 as a legal safeguard ahead of Monday’s anticipated ruling.
WHAT WILL BE THE CONSEQUENCES?
Nearly a year into the legal onslaught, the CHP is level with Erdogan’s ruling AK Party (AKP) in polls, maintaining the strength that it showed in 2024 local elections when it dealt the AKP a sharp electoral blow.
A presidential vote is not scheduled until 2028, but it will need to come sooner if Erdogan wants to run again and he would need significant parliamentary support to make that happen.
Investors will be closely watching the events in NATO-member Turkey.
The investigations have already shaken financial markets this year, threatening to undermine a gradual return of confidence since 2023 elections led to an overhaul of previous unorthodox policy that had caused a lira crisis.
ARE THERE PRECEDENTS FOR SUCH POLITICAL TURMOIL?
Not since three coups between 1960-1980 have such high-profile political leaders been removed from office on the basis of as yet unpublished evidence, which suspects’ lawyers dismiss as fabricated.
In 2013, Turkey arrested thousands of Turks over the anti-government Gezi Park protests. The latest legal drive, though smaller in scale, has gone further in targeting a would-be future government, riding high in the polls.
Turkey’s main pro-Kurdish party, the third largest in parliament, has also faced a sustained crackdown in the past decade, with thousands of its members arrested and dozens of mayors removed from their posts.
(Reporting by Daren Butler;Editing by Jonathan Spicer and Helen Popper)
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