Republican People’s Party

Republican People’s Party (CHP), oldest political party in Turkey (Türkiye), created by the country’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, in 1923 just before the proclamation of the Turkish republic. As the main political vehicle for the secularist and statist ideology of Kemalism, the CHP has traditionally been associated with Turkey’s urban elites—though it has often tried, with limited success, to broaden its coalition to include the working class and the rural population. Although it initially enjoyed single-party rule in Turkey’s early decades, it has not held a majority in parliament since 1950. Its political fortunes sank deeper as the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi; AKP), which began ruling Turkey in 2002, consolidated power. Amid an unprecedented crackdown by Pres. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan that began in 2025, the CHP appeared to be on the verge of collapse.

Mustafa Kemal and the creation of the CHP

Under Mustafa Kemal’s leadership, the CHP dominated all assemblies until 1950. The small Progressive Republican Party (November 1924–June 1925) had only 29 members and was suppressed. The similarly short-lived Liberal Republican Party (August–December 1930) was an abortive attempt by Mustafa Kemal to organize a moderate opposition to his own party.

In 1931 the CHP outlined six principles—republicanism, nationalism, populism, statism, secularism, and reformism—which were subsequently enshrined in the Turkish constitution in 1937. By then Mustafa Kemal’s health was already in decline. These “Six Arrows” of Kemalism remained the core values of Turkish politics through the end of the 20th century. But the tensions that would later befall the CHP were already apparent upon Mustafa Kemal’s death in 1938: While life improved for urban professionals, the proportion of the urban population remained stagnant at one-fourth and the country’s overall per capita income and literacy rate were below comparable figures for developed countries.

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Turkey: Government

İsmet İnönü, Mustafa Kemal’s longtime prime minister, succeeded him as president. İnönü encouraged the creation of a multiparty system, and in 1946 he allowed the CHP to splinter, giving birth to the Democrat Party (DP), which was more relaxed in its commitment to statism and secularism. With other restrictions on political freedom relaxed, the DP quickly positioned itself as the CHP’s main rival. In Turkey’s first competitive elections, in 1950, the DP gained support in the more populous countryside and won 396 out of 487 seats. İnönü, resisting advice from military leaders to ignore the result, resigned from the presidency and took up a new role as the leader of the opposition in the parliament. He subsequently formed three short-lived coalition governments between 1961 and 1965, and his successor Bülent Ecevit led two coalition governments and one minority government between 1974 and 1979, but the CHP never again succeeded in forming a majority government on its own.

The Turkish government was deposed in a military coup in 1980, and in the aftermath, the CHP (along with every other party) was banned from politics. Its former cadres scattered to new parties formed after the 1982 constitution was promulgated. In 1992, Deniz Baykal, a member of parliament, and his followers reestablished the CHP. By then several of the newer parties had been firmly established, and in the 1995 elections the party finished fifth. In the 1999 elections it earned less than one-tenth of the vote and failed to win any seats in parliament.

Main opposition to Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP)

In 2002 the CHP had a comeback of sorts, when it came second in the elections, indicating it was competitive for the first time since it was reconstituted. But it lost to the new Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi; AKP), the nonconfessional successor to the Islamist Welfare Party (WP; Refah Partisi) that had briefly ruled in the mid-1990s before losing in 1997 and being banned in 1998. The CHP gained support in part by bringing reformists into the fold, including Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, but the AKP’s platform to remove guardrails in the economy ultimately attracted a growing middle class in Anatolia who had long been left behind by the Kemalist urban professionals in financial and business centers such as Istanbul. As the parliament’s only opposition party following the elections, the CHP was unable to meaningfully oppose the AKP through the legislative process and instead resorted to suing the constitutional court and the president, Ahmet Necdet Sezer, to annul new laws. Meanwhile, within the CHP, a small group of leaders clung tightly to their hold on the party and suppressed the reformists that had helped them earn second place.

In 2010 Baykal was forced to resign from party leadership amid scandal. Kılıçdaroğlu ran unopposed to replace Baykal and tried to rapidly transform the party’s image in time for the 2011 elections. He traveled the country, taking the unusual step of campaigning to Turks in small towns and rural areas. Party leaders laid out proposals for relieving poverty, improving social security, and reforming the education system and admitted members from backgrounds unusual for the CHP, including a Kurdish activist and a union leader. Some of the old guard accused Kılıçdaroğlu of diluting the party’s values. But when the elections were held, the CHP showed moderate improvement across Turkey.

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The AKP continued consolidating power throughout the 2010s and, after a coup attempt in 2016, turned increasingly authoritarian. In 2023 the CHP assembled a coalition of six opposition parties to defeat Erdoğan and back its presidential candidate, Kılıçdaroğlu. The largest party representing the country’s considerable Kurdish minority also chose not to field a candidate and called on its supporters to vote for Kılıçdaroğlu. Erdoğan was victorious, but Kılıçdaroğlu had presented the most serious electoral challenge yet, gaining enough support to force Erdoğan into a runoff election.

Özgür Özel’s leadership: The rise and fall of the CHP

Nonetheless, some members of the CHP blamed Kılıçdaroğlu for the loss, arguing that given the high level of frustration with Erdoğan—especially in the aftermath of the Kahramanmaraş earthquake in February—better leadership could have led to Erdoğan’s ouster. In November he was replaced by Özgür Özel, a veteran lawmaker and former pharmacist who was backed by reformists. Özel promised a “bold and determined policy” against the “embarrassing and passive politics” that he believed had long characterized the CHP. In 2024 the CHP won local elections in most of the country’s major cities and provinces, in what amounted to the AKP’s worst defeat since its rise to power.

In 2025 Ekrem İmamoğlu, a member of the CHP who had been the mayor of Istanbul since 2019, was considered one of the best-positioned candidates to challenge Erdoğan. As the CHP was preparing to formally name him as its next presidential candidate in March, the government arrested him on charges of graft and aiding the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan; PKK), a militant group designated as a terrorist organization under Turkish law. İmamoğlu was jailed and formally disqualified from public office.

In the aftermath, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in what turned out to be Turkey’s largest protests in a dozen years. By September, the government had detained more than 500 people, including 17 mayors, in what it called a corruption purge.

In May 2026 a court overturned the 2023 party primary in which Özel was elected, ordering Kılıçdaroğlu to resume his leadership role. The ruling threw the party into chaos. In July Özel formed a new party, the New Party (Yeni Parti), and took with him about two-thirds of the CHP’s members in the parliament. The move returned Özel to leadership of the main opposition, but it dealt a further blow to the CHP.