By Nergis Demirkaya
There's a Turkish saying for describing one misfortune piling on another: 'What happened to us didn't even happen to the boiled chicken'. The last three years for opposition leaders Özgür Özel and Ekrem İmamoğlu, and the 'Change Movement' they lead, bring that saying to mind.
Everything began a year after the Change Movement won control of the CHP at its November 2023 congress and made it the largest party in local elections in March 2024. Once it emerged that Ekrem İmamoğlu — who had just won Istanbul for a second time by a wide margin — would run for president, the judicial assault now known as the March 19 operation began. That wave, set off by İmamoğlu's arrest, has since reached 40 CHP-run municipalities according to the latest count, and is still ongoing.
Although the operations purport to be driven by suspicion of corruption and bribery, polling suggests the public reads them differently: as a political move aimed at knocking Erdoğan's strongest rival, İmamoğlu, out of the race.
According to the opposition, sidelining the strongest rival wasn't enough — the next move was to split the CHP itself. There was already a claim of irregularity at the congress at which the Change Movement had won control. Little attention was paid to it at first, but the dispute grew over time and the cases became more serious. Almost two and a half years after that congress, the 'absolute nullity' ruling of May 21 removed the Özel administration from office and restored the former Kılıçdaroğlu leadership to the head of the CHP. The ruling split the party, leading Özel to found a new opposition movement under his own leadership, called the Yeni Party. That was the second stage of the operations.
MORE TROUBLE EVERY DAY
These two phases — alleged to have been carried out to eliminate the strongest rival and split the CHP ahead of the critical 2028 election, Erdoğan's last as a candidate — are now complete. But the problem hasn't gone away for the AKP. According to politicians from the Yeni Party, since the March 19 and May 21 operations failed to deliver the intended result, the Yeni Party's chair, Özgür Özel, has now become the target. Talk has begun that the path is being cleared to strip Özel of his immunity and open the way up to his arrest.
The reason such talk has intensified is two new indictments drawn up just two weeks after the Yeni Party's founding, seeking to strip both Özel and his close colleague, MP Veli Ağbaba, of immunity on charges of 'accepting bribes in a chain of transactions.'
Stripping immunity means removing the shield that protects a sitting MP from prosecution or arrest while in office.
More than 60 such files seeking to lift Özel's immunity are known to have been drawn up over the years. But if the government does intend to strip his immunity, it's this most recent file that will be the one taken up, according to sources from his party.
The manner in which these new files were made public is cited as evidence of that intent. Normally, referral files concerning MPs move quietly through legal channels — from the chief public prosecutor's office to the Justice Ministry, and from there to parliament. Once a file reaches parliament, its contents are disclosed only to the MP concerned, if they ask. But the files on Özel and Ağbaba were announced to the public, with their contents laid out in detail, by the press office of the Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor before they had even reached parliament. A senior Yeni Party politician commented: 'This amounts to a breach of personal data privacy and a trampling of the presumption of innocence. It appears the aim is to build public perception around a bribery charge — and to prepare society for an eventual arrest, should immunity be lifted.'
Another senior Yeni Party official described a possible immunity move against the party chair as a 'third stage' of the campaign following the March 19 and May 21 operations — but added a pointed observation: 'If they need this third operation, that tells you they haven't gotten the result they wanted from the first two. Mark my words — even if they go ahead with this immunity move, they still won't get the result they're after. The opposition forming against Erdoğan will only grow larger.'
WORRIES IN THE AKP
This view isn't confined to the opposition — some AKP politicians share it too. A long-serving AKP MP warned that a move to lift immunity, coming on top of one operation after another, could backfire: 'A step like that wouldn't set the Yeni Party back — if anything, it could make it bigger. This is a movement that took in close to 300 million lira in donations from over 100,000 people in a single week. That's worth taking seriously.'
There are also those within the AKP who believe the latest file on Özel won't actually be acted on — that it will simply be held as a 'stick.' But much the same was said of the absolute nullity ruling: that it would merely hang overhead, like the sword of Damocles. It happened nevertheless.
Not a single immunity file has been taken up in the parliament by the 2023 election. In the term before that, the few files that were acted on involved either terrorism or cases like sexual assault, where public sentiment ran high. A senior AKP official says this stance on immunity hasn't changed for now, but voices within the party are growing that argue otherwise: that with corruption and bribery cases on the rise lately, parliament could take responsibility and act. In the end, though, it's Erdoğan who will decide the matter.
When the Yeni Party was founded, there was no shortage of claims that it wouldn't have an easy time of it — that it would face obstacles of one kind or another. A move on immunity could well be one of them. Parliament is set to go into recess once the framework law passes; it wouldn't be a surprise if it reopens in October with exactly this on the agenda.
