President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan received MHP Chair Devlet Bahçeli at the presidential complex in Ankara on April 30 for a closed-door meeting lasting approximately one hour.
It was only the second face-to-face encounter between the two coalition partners this year — their previous meeting took place on Jan. 21— and the first in over three months.
No official statement on the agenda was released. The two were expected to have discussed the Terror-Free Turkey process, as well as regional developments including the situation in Syria and the ongoing Iran crisis.
With alliance dynamics and the 2028 electoral calendar increasingly in focus, the meeting between Erdoğan and Bahçeli gave both the opportunity to update and review their agenda, according to the reports.
A PARTY IN THE MIDST OF REORGANIZATION
The meeting comes at a significant moment for Bahçeli's party.
Since the dismissal of Deputy Chair İzzet Ulvi Yönter in late March, Bahçeli has moved swiftly to restructure the MHP's provincial apparatus, dissolving twelve district and provincial branches associated with Yönter across the country — from Istanbul to Gaziantep — and replacing their heads with loyalists of the headquarters.
A senior bureaucrat close to Yönter has also been removed from his post at the Nuclear Regulatory Authority, indicating that the dismissals will not only target the party members but also the MHP affiliated bureaucrats.
The purge is not merely a settling of scores, but a preparatory repositioning ahead of MHP's upcoming party congress — expected to be formally launched after the Eid al-Adha holiday in May.
