TKP General Secretary on collapse of political sphere

Editor’s note: Since March 2025, judicial and administrative interventions targeting the main opposition in Turkey — particularly CHP-run municipalities and potential presidential candidates — have occupied the centre of the political agenda. In this article, Kemal Okuyan argues that the interventions against the opposition and the steady narrowing of the electoral sphere should be understood not so much as an attempt by the government to monopolise politics, but as the collapse of the existing political sphere itself. He discusses the dilemmas this collapse creates for the government, the possible ways forward for the capitalist order, and the opportunities the resulting vacuum may open up for revolutionary politics.

We have lost count. How many mayors have been arrested, how many removed from office, how many mayors and municipal council members have switched parties — it is impossible to keep track anymore. The AKP crossed the psychological threshold long ago. There are now no political or social barriers left to the government reshaping elected offices as it sees fit.

At first, the process was thought to have begun as a way of eliminating a presidential candidate. The operation of 19 March 2025 meant bringing down Erdoğan’s strongest rival. But it did not stop there. The results of the 2024 local elections were dismantled one by one. Then came direct intervention in the main opposition party itself. The CHP, whose chairman was effectively appointed by the government, split in two. And still it did not end there.

The defections continue, and there is talk of new operations. Özgür Özel (1) is expected to distance himself even further from Ekrem İmamoğlu (2); Mansur Yavaş (3) is not even to entertain the thought of running for president; Özgür Özel is to be the candidate, but he had better not get too carried away with the idea either...

What else? What else is there?

For our President to stand for office one more time, an early election is required. But the economy is in bad shape and will not recover in 2027 either, which means the elections need to be held on schedule. They seriously floated the idea: “Let’s bring them forward by a week and call it an early election.” Personally, I think they should have said: “Why burden the country with ridiculous legal contrivances like this? Let us simply rise above such things and have the government and opposition jointly proclaim Mr Erdoğan’s candidacy.”

And in fact they did!

As I was writing these lines, we read the proposal: let every party declare his candidacy, and let us all elect our president together. How fitting. Apparently, in the parliamentary elections, people would still be free to vote for whichever party they liked!

A minister of the cabinet has already declared that much: the next election will be held to elect Erdoğan one more time.

According to some, everything that has been happening amounts to nothing more than the government declaring a monopoly over politics.

That is certainly the intention. But is that the outcome?

Across the world, the right to elect and be elected is being systematically undermined — everywhere, and through different methods. “De-electoralisation” is a useful concept. But we must also ask what is being put in its place. State coercion alone is clearly not enough to govern a society. Elections are one of humanity’s most important achievements, but under relations of oppressor and oppressed they are also a mechanism skilfully used to persuade, contain and distract the oppressed.

To render this mechanism dysfunctional, or to all but eliminate it, you need to replace it with something at least as powerful. Throughout the twentieth century, the military coups and fascist dictatorships seen in many countries were deployed to break the resistance of the working class and dismantle it organisationally and politically. Some of these regimes, through various forms of demagoguery, won the support of significant sections of society. Some fled high inflation, others instability, others “anarchy,” and sought refuge in dictatorships. They gave up the right to elect and be elected.

As the power of that demagoguery faded, dissatisfaction with these dictatorships grew. Some were brought down by popular movements; others ended through the manoeuvring of bourgeois forces adept at compromise.

The tendency toward “de-electoralisation” that we see in the world today, however, feeds not on the presence of a strong working-class movement, but on its absence. The multinational monopolies, with no organised resistance standing in their way, want more — and then more still. Meanwhile, rivalry is intensifying among the states, or blocs of states, on which these monopolies rely. Such is the law of capitalism.

In this rivalry, they do not want “domestic politics” getting underfoot. They want to act as swiftly and with as little oversight as their rivals. And after all, there is no “popular” movement worth taking seriously anyway.

Every government thinks this way.

But...

They have nothing to offer society other than anxiety, fear, helplessness and the prospect of no future. And on top of that, they are going to try to make elections even more meaningless!

Let us forget, for a moment, everything written above — forget the past and forget the world. Let us return to Turkey and to the present.

What is happening today is not the government declaring a monopoly over the political sphere. It is the destruction of the political sphere itself. We are almost there.

For them to be able to govern the country in this way, they would need another compelling story to sell. There are plenty of stories, of course... The condition of pensioners, the condition of workers, the state of the stock market, education, hospitals... Stories abound. But as is obvious, there is no success story capable of replacing elections and the political sphere. It is more like a horror film.

A monopoly over politics, they say...

If the AKP were a young, rising opposition party offering an alternative to a society exhausted, weary and fed up with the current government, then the wind behind it might allow it temporarily to succeed in de-electoralising and depoliticising the country.

But after twenty-five years in government, a party could only get away with telling society, “Your right to vote and stand for election no longer matters to me,” if said citizens were living in abundance and prosperity.

I repeat: what is happening today is not monopolisation of the political shpere. It is the collapse of politics as a whole.

One could name a dozen figures from within the AKP camp itself, who have pointed to this collapse and expressed their unease (perhaps even panic) about it. As the government intervenes against political actors within the same system with the intensity of a class antagonism, it is not dominating the political sphere per se, but is liquidating it.

Because society, including the AKP’s own base, is not convinced by this level of antagonism.

An election whose outcome is already seen as a foregone conclusion in Erdoğan’s favour could never amount to a “political victory.” Elections have already lost a great deal of their credibility.

The real question is whether the government is capable of putting anything in place of the political sphere.

Let me remind the readers of what we said when the interventions against the CHP began: Every blow the government strikes against the opposition, weakens the government itself. At this point, because the political sphere that once enveloped the AKP (and perhaps even made it appear preferable by comparison) has evaporated, every disaster, from the so-called peace process to ever-persistent inflation, from the funds scandal to other forms of corruption, now lands directly on the head of the government.

Had the AKP not narrowed the political sphere so drastically with its own hands, it might have been able to shed some deadweight and escape under the slogan “we are cleaning up our own house.”

But it is far too late for that now.

The question that must now be asked is how a system can continue on its path when its government has been worn down from every direction, while its opposition is weak and has lost its ability to act independently. Neo-Ottomanism is, for a number of reasons, a perfectly plausible strategy from the standpoint of the capitalist class, and Ömer Koç (4) recently gave it his blessing once again. Yet alongside the objective obstacles preventing this strategy from being implemented, a very serious subjective obstacle has now emerged: the AKP, which matured this strategy, has largely lost the skill and control required to carry it out.

One option is to make a move that would place implementation of this strategy under the baton of an actor standing relatively outside the evaporating political arena.

Another option is the answer to the question we asked above — “Can the government put something in place of the political arena?”: War.

It is of course also possible that the AKP may cling to power despite losing so much credibility and excitement. But the longer this continues, the greater the cost to the system, i.e., to the capitalist rule. The system will therefore put pressure on the AKP either to transform itself or to generate some new formation from within its own ranks. As I stressed above, such a renewal would require far more than simply “shedding some dead weight.”

There is also a hard version of this renewal. The peace process, which appears increasingly deadlocked, and the fund scandal both reinforce indications that there are forces within the system inclined to give the government a radical shake-up.

It should of course also be noted that Ekrem İmamoğlu could serve as the reserve option for such a model of renewal.

Another possibility is that a revolutionary actor, taking advantage of the narrowing political sphere, pours a far greater force than anything we have witnessed so far onto this decaying social system that itself spreads decay.

Whatever happens, Turkey is now facing a crisis of governance that can no longer be brushed aside or pacified, and the capitalist class is beginning to realise that unless a solution is found, this crisis will become a systemic crisis.

To boil it all down: the issue goes far beyond “Who should be the candidate, Mansur or Ekrem?” The foremost task of every revolutionary today is to break society's habit of viewing the country through the prism of the main opposition. The narrowing of the political sphere must be treated as an opportunity to clear the way for real politics.

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(1) Özgür Özel: While serving as Chairman of the CHP, Özel was removed from office by a court ruling in 2026, and former chairman Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu and his leadership team were reinstated in his place. Özel subsequently founded the YENİ Party together with his team and 90 MPs who left the CHP, and became its chairman.

(2) Ekrem İmamoğlu: While serving as Mayor of Istanbul and emerging as one of the strongest potential presidential challengers to Erdoğan, İmamoğlu was detained and arrested in the operation of 19 March 2025 and removed from office. He remains in pre-trial detention in cases the opposition describes as politically motivated interventions.

(3) Mansur Yavaş: Mayor of Ankara. Yavaş resigned from the CHP in September 2026 and announced that he would continue serving as an independent. His name continues to be mentioned among possible candidates in the next presidential election.

(4) Ömer Koç: A leading member of the Koç family, which controls Koç Holding, one of Turkey’s largest capital groups, and Chairman of the holding company’s Board of Directors. In remarks made in September 2026, he strongly criticised Israel and the United States, United Kingdom and European Union for supporting it, while arguing that Turkey could assume a central position in the emerging international order.