Turkey’s DEM Party condemns court ouster of opposition CHP leaders

Turkey’s pro-Kurdish DEM Party said the court-ordered removal of the main opposition Republican People’s Party leadership was a warning sign for what remains of the country’s democratic guardrails, after riot police used tear gas to enter the CHP’s Ankara headquarters and escorted ousted leader Ozgur Ozel out.

The intervention, which unfolded Sunday after a legal dispute over an internal party congress, quickly moved beyond an internal CHP fight and into a broader confrontation over how Turkey treats rival political forces. DEM co-chair Tuncer Bakirhan said political parties should have their fate decided by members and voters, not by courts, and he described the police operation as shameful and unacceptable. The CHP had already denounced the ruling as a judicial coup and vowed to keep fighting it.

The court’s decision to annul the CHP’s 2023 congress and reinstall former leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu deepened long-running accusations that the judiciary is being used as a political tool. President Tayyip Erdogan’s AK Party rejects that criticism, but the sequence of events sharpened fears that legal pressure can be turned into a political weapon against opponents who challenge the government’s hold on power.

DEM’s reaction carried added weight because it is not a fringe voice. The party is the third-largest force in parliament, behind the CHP and Erdogan’s AK Party, and it has tried to advance peace between the Turkish state and the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party. That conflict has killed more than 40,000 people since 1984, and DEM’s warnings suggested that pressure on the CHP may also reverberate through the already fragile political space around Kurdish issues.

For the opposition, the stakes go beyond who leads the CHP today. If courts can overturn party congresses and police can enforce those decisions inside party headquarters, opposition groups may face a harder path to organize, choose leaders and present a unified challenge in future elections. The episode also risked widening the sense among Western allies that Turkey’s institutions are bending further away from competitive politics and toward managed opposition, a shift that could complicate Ankara’s ties with capitals that have long treated democratic backsliding as a central concern.

What happened at the CHP headquarters signaled more than a leadership struggle. It showed how quickly a legal ruling, a police operation and a party dispute can combine into a test of whether Turkey’s opposition can still contest power on equal terms.