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Neither the CHP Nor Any Other Opposition Party Can Defeat Erdoğan Without Confronting July 15

Turkey’s opposition is now being subjected to the political and judicial machinery that Recep Tayyip Erdoğan constructed after July 15, 2016. Yet the CHP still refuses to confront the official story that gave this machinery its legitimacy. Ekrem İmamoğlu, the elected mayor of Istanbul and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s most formidable electoral rival, has been imprisoned since March 2025. As of July 2026, he is defending himself against 142 charges in a case built around a 3,900-page indictment. The government presents the proceedings as an ordinary corruption prosecution. İmamoğlu and the CHP describe them as a politically engineered campaign intended to remove Erdoğan’s strongest potential presidential challenger. The pressure extends far beyond İmamoğlu. Hundreds of CHP members, municipal officials and elected representatives have been detained. So far, authorities have detained hundreds of people, including dozens of mayors and party officials. Elected mayors have been suspended, municipal mandates have been overridden, and the threat of government-appointed trustees has spread from predominantly Kurdish municipalities to CHP-controlled local governments. Then came the direct assault on the CHP itself. On May 21, 2026, an appeals court annulled the CHP’s November 2023 congress, removed Özgür Özel and the party’s elected leadership, and restored former chairman Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu. The ruling also invalidated later congresses at which Özel had been re-elected. Human Rights Watch described the decision as part of a broader effort to sideline the principal opposition party, while the CHP called it a judicial coup. Erdoğan’s political system is no longer satisfied with prosecuting opposition politicians. It increasingly claims the power to determine who may govern municipalities, who may run against the president and even who may lead the country’s largest opposition party. Yet neither the CHP nor any other opposition movement can understand what is happening today without confronting what happened after July 15, 2016. The road to İmamoğlu’s prison cell, the removal of elected mayors and the judicial ousting of Özel did not begin in 2025 or 2026. The foundations were laid when Erdoğan transformed July 15 into an unquestionable state doctrine—and when much of the opposition helped him do it. The CHP’s responsibility began at Yenikapı The CHP should never have accepted July 15 as a genuine military coup attempt. It was not a coherent operation designed to seize and hold state power. It was a controlled and deliberately doomed operation whose failure was built into its structure, while soldiers—especially conscripts, pilots and lower-ranking personnel—were deceived about the real nature of the assignments they were ordered to carry out. The party therefore had no reason to begin from Erdoğan’s premise that Turkey had narrowly escaped a conventional military takeover. The deaths, gunfire, deployment of tanks, explosion at Parliament and other acts of violence demanded investigation and individual accountability. But condemning the violence did not require accepting the government’s explanation of who organized it, who gave the operational orders or who ultimately benefited from and controlled its outcome. Even the most dramatic events of the night should not be treated as closed questions merely because Erdoğan’s courts assigned responsibility. The public still cannot know with confidence who ordered every bombing, who authorized every flight, who fired every decisive shot or how the separate operations in Ankara, Istanbul and Marmaris were coordinated. Erdoğan’s government announced its conclusions almost immediately, then used emergency courts and mass prosecutions to convert those conclusions into an official history. What Turkey never received was a genuinely independent truth-seeking inquiry capable of testing the state’s account against all military records, intelligence communications, radar data, flight logs, ballistics reports and witness testimony. The alleged operation against Erdoğan in Marmaris is among the clearest examples of why the official narrative cannot be accepted at face value. The government described the Marmaris mission as an attempt to assassinate Erdoğan. Gökhan Şahin Sönmezateş, the brigadier general who commanded the team sent there, gave a different account. He said his orders were to take Erdoğan into custody and transport him safely to Ankara. Sönmezateş testified that his unit was ready at approximately 10:25 p.m. but was kept waiting at Çiğli Air Base for around four hours. He said the team took off at approximately 2:25 a.m.—long after Erdoğan had reportedly left his hotel and after his aircraft had departed from Dalaman. According to Sönmezateş, the order to wait came through the Akıncı Air Base operations centre. He repeatedly asked who had deliberately delayed the team and why it was finally sent to a location where Erdoğan was no longer present. This was not a minor operational error. If the purpose was genuinely to capture or kill Erdoğan, keeping the assigned team on the ground for approximately four hours while its supposed target escaped makes no military sense. It does, however, make sense if the team was being used as part of a controlled spectacle: delayed until Erdoğan was safe, then sent toward an empty hotel so that the government could later claim that the president had escaped assassination by only minutes. Sönmezateş said that he and the soldiers under his command had been sent into a trap. He maintained that they were dispatched only after Erdoğan had left Marmaris and after the whole country knew that he was travelling to Istanbul. He also said he would not have taken those soldiers to the hotel had he known what was occurring. The deaths of two police officers at the hotel also require renewed investigation. The official indictment attributed the fatal confrontation to the military team sent to the area. But in his May 2026 retrial testimony, Sönmezateş alleged that the wounds and weapons evidence did not correspond with the prosecution’s account. He claimed that one officer had been killed with a knife, another with a shotgun, and that an unidentified weapon found at the scene was acknowledged by neither the military nor the police. He consequently described the killings as unresolved. There have also been allegations of unexplained helicopter activity and gunfire in the hotel area before the Sönmezateş team arrived. A genuine inquiry would reconstruct…