Analysis
Smart, independent reporting on Turkey's politics, economy and foreign affairs.
After Atatürk’s death, İsmet İnönü was elected Turkey’s second president and the second person to lead the CHP. He ran the party for 34 years, from 1938 to 1972. When CHP members elected Bülent Ecevit as chair at the 1972 congress, İnönü left the party, most likely with deep resentment. When he died in 1973 at the age of 89, he was not even a member of the CHP.
Jailed former HDP co-chair Selahattin Demirtaş rejected remarks by former Parliament Speaker Bülent Arınç suggesting Demirtaş wished to meet President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and tell him he held no resentment. After a visit to Edirne Prison, Arınç said Demirtaş wanted to tell Erdoğan, “I hold no grudge against you.” Demirtaş responded with a handwritten note, saying he never expressed such a thought. “What troubles me most is being associated with words and ideas I never hinted at,” he wrote.
During a party debate, veteran AKP politician Bülent Arınç once distinguished himself from his comrades by declaring, “I have a certain weight of my own.” Though Arınç’s own weight has faded over the past decade, if one were to search for true “political weight” in today’s Turkey, one name stands out above all: Devlet Bahçeli. Having led the MHP for 28 years, Bahçeli has always been a force shaping Turkish politics—but in recent years, as part of the ruling People’s Alliance, he has become almost the determining factor in many critical decisions.
Serdar Öktem, a lawyer affiliated with the MHP and a defendant in the 2022 assassination case of former Grey Wolves leader Sinan Ateş, died after being shot outside his office by masked assailants on Oct. 6. The attackers opened fire while Öktem was inside his car in front of his office on Büyükdere Avenue in Istanbul’s Zincirlikuyu district. Surveillance video showed six bullet holes in the window of his car. Despite emergency medical intervention, Öktem succumbed to his injuries at the hospital.
In Turkish, the term for ambassador has undergone a transformation as sweeping as the empire it once served. The old-fashioned word was “Sefir,” from the Arabic s‑f‑r root meaning “to bear a message,” and the highest rank was Sefir‑i Kebir—the Grand Envoy—complete with embroidered robes and horse-led fanfare. Today, the bureaucratic “Büyükelçi” literally means “great envoy,” yet, put in plain Turkish, it feels a little less illustrious.
Bülent Arınç. Most recently, he stirred controversy with his criticism of the cancellation of Ekrem İmamoğlu’s diploma and his detention. “Neighborhood” has become a widely used concept that reflects the deep polarization in Turkish politics. There’s an “AKP neighborhood,” we say, and there’s an “opposition neighborhood.” But with his remarks, which carried a tone of self-criticism, Arınç managed to draw a backlash from both his own neighborhood and its direct opposite. For those who know him, Arınç’s remarks came as no surprise. Throughout the AKP’s 23 years in power, he has been one of the few — perhaps the only — figures to voice such open dissent from within. Why? He puts it this way: “I have a certain weight of my own. I’m not like the others.”