Turkish police forcibly raided the national headquarters of the main opposition party, the Republican People's Party (CHP), this Sunday, culminating what the party describes as a week of systematic harassment. This escalation comes after a court declared its primary elections invalid and security forces arrested more than a dozen people currently or formerly linked to the party.
The police intervention was carried out at the request of Kemal Kilicdaroglu, former leader of the CHP, who has regained leadership after the Ankara Regional Court of Appeals' ruling on the primaries that gave victory to the leader recognized until now, Ozgür Ozel. The latter has locked himself in his office, from where he has disseminated a video in which he accuses his opponent of being "a puppet of the judiciary," a "coup plotter," and a "traitor" in the service of the Turkish president and Ozel's nemesis, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
For his part, Kilicdaroglu's lawyer, Celal Celik, has argued that the intervention request was necessary because Ozel has refused for days to sit down and negotiate with his client about the serious internal crisis the party is going through. "They are not even letting their deputies pass," he denounced in statements reported by the newspaper 'Birgun', before declaring "all constructive initiatives and efforts to engage in talks" to have failed.
The CHP has maintained for years that it is the subject of a political persecution campaign. As an example, they point to the situation of who many in the opposition saw as one of the great figures with a chance to defeat Erdogan at the polls: the dismissed mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoglu, imprisoned in March 2025 for alleged corruption offenses and also stripped of his university degree, a prerequisite for aspiring to the Presidency.