The Turkish opposition was plunged into its gravest crisis in a century this weekend, after a court voided the election of Republican People’s Party (CHP) leader Özgür Özel and police detained 13 people in connection with the very party congress that brought him to power. The twin blows, which the CHP condemned as a “judicial coup”, effectively decapitate the country’s main secularist opposition and mark an unprecedented entanglement of the judiciary in party politics.

On Thursday, an Ankara appeals court annulled the 2023 CHP congress, citing unspecified irregularities, and ordered the reinstatement of former chairman Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the veteran politician who lost to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in elections earlier that year. Özel, who had appealed, saw the higher judicial body reject his plea on Friday evening, leaving him with no further legal recourse under domestic law. Outside the party’s 16-storey headquarters in Ankara, thousands of supporters gathered in protest, while inside lights burned through the night as officials denounced the ruling. “We are experiencing a black day for Turkish democracy,” Özel told reporters, vowing to stay “day and night” in his post and to fight on through civil disobedience if necessary.

Viewed from European capitals, the episode is being read as the sharpest escalation yet in a long campaign of legal harassment against the CHP, which already faces dozens of cases targeting its elected mayors and officials. Le Temps described the court’s intervention as a “political earthquake” without precedent in the century-old republic founded by the party itself. BBC Persian noted that the ruling removes the most formidable obstacle to Erdoğan’s consolidation of power ahead of the 2028 presidential election, at a moment when the opposition had begun to regain momentum after its 2023 electoral defeat. The weekend detentions, reported by state media and carried internationally by agencies, widen the net to party operatives, with police investigating the very congress that the courts have now erased.

The convergence of judicial orders and criminal investigations leaves the CHP leaderless and under a legal cloud, prompting analysts in London and Brussels to warn that Turkey’s democratic space is contracting at an alarming clip. While Özel’s defiant stance and the street protests suggest that the ruling could galvanise the opposition’s base, the immediate effect is to sideline a charismatic leader and restore a divisive figure in Kılıçdaroğlu, who is seen by many as a spent force. The coming weeks will test whether the international community, currently preoccupied with geopolitical crises elsewhere, will treat this as a breaking point in its already strained relations with Ankara.