MHP leader Bahçeli urges Kılıçdaroğlu to step aside and broker compromise candidate with Özel after Ankara court voids CHP's 2023 congress

Ankara's Regional Court of Appeals ruled on May 21 that the Republican People's Party's (CHP) 38th Ordinary Congress, held on 4-5 November 2023, was "absolutely null and void." The decision invalidates the congress at which Özgür Özel defeated Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu for the leadership of Turkey's main opposition party, treats every subsequent ordinary and extraordinary congress as legally invalid from the outset, and as a precautionary measure suspends Özel along with the party's Central Executive Board, Party Assembly and High Disciplinary Board until the ruling becomes final. The court ordered the restoration of the pre-congress leadership structure, allowing Kılıçdaroğlu and his former administration to resume authority pending final judicial review. The ruling can still be appealed before the Court of Cassation within two weeks of notification; an appeal has already been announced.

On the evening of the ruling, MHP leader Devlet Bahçeli told CNN Türk anchor Hande Fırat that Kılıçdaroğlu should "undertake a historic responsibility in order not to hurt this deeply rooted institution, not to damage it and not to cause chaos," and should meet with Özel to declare, within the bounds of the law, that he would waive his position in favour of "a joint formula for the future of the party." Bahçeli said developments had vindicated his earlier insistence that the CHP's internal affairs should be handled "calmly and within the rule of law," and warned that "resistance instead of responsibility is unnecessary." He cast the question as one of national stability, linking it to Türkiye's regional security challenges and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's "Terror-Free Türkiye" process.

Yetkin Report political analyst Murat Yetkin wrote that Bahçeli's televised intervention tracked a behind-the-scenes plan he had heard from a source half an hour earlier: Özel would agree to step down from the CHP chair in exchange for Kılıçdaroğlu pulling the complainants from the nullity suit, after which both men would back a mutually agreed third name as compromise candidate at a fresh congress. The plan, Yetkin noted, would also dissolve İmamoğlu's presidential candidacy and any path to the CHP chairmanship — Özel's leadership team had previously announced İmamoğlu's nomination, but that announcement becomes void once the Court of Cassation upholds the lower-court ruling.

Özel rejected the framing immediately. In a Genel Merkez statement after the ruling, the suspended CHP leader said the party refused "the comfortable, eternal opposition seats" being offered — a phrase Yetkin Report read as a double-edged dismissal of both an Erdoğan-aligned settlement and the back-channel diplomacy with Kılıçdaroğlu of the past few days. Yetkin Report also documented that AKP figures had attempted to reach Erdoğan to block the timing of the ruling — issued on Thursday May 21, the day before the start of the nine-day Kurban Bayramı holiday — but failed; only Justice Minister Akın Gürlek publicly defended the timing, claiming the decision "consolidated democracy."

Bahçeli's intervention positions the MHP not only as a sponsor of the Terror-Free Türkiye process but as a self-styled arbiter of Turkey's wider judicial-political balance. Yetkin argued the ruling threatens to sabotage Erdoğan's EU and NATO outreach in the run-up to the alliance summit and to derail an updated Terror-Free Türkiye roadmap that Bahçeli himself had pressed the president to adopt. The CHP, Yetkin concluded, will not abandon resistance, and the fait accompli sought by Gürlek's timing is unlikely to close the dispute: "This pilaf will take more water yet."