The political alliance between Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) and the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi, MHP) has long been a paradox. Since 2018, the two parties have formally operated under the “People’s Alliance” (Cumhur İttifakı), which has ensured electoral victories and the consolidation of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s power. However, the relationship has been characterized by cycles of loyalty, distrust, and mutual blackmail despite its apparent partnership. The rift is not simply ideological or tactical; it is deeply structural, shaped by the intersection of mafia networks, security institutions, and the personal ambitions of Erdoğan and the succession battles within the MHP.
The current form of this alliance can be traced back to the political crisis that followed the June 2015 general elections. In those elections, Erdoğan’s AKP lost its parliamentary majority for the first time since 2002, while the HDP emerged as the third-largest party, surpassing the MHP for the first time and successfully crossing the 10 percent threshold. However, the coalition negotiations failed; CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu even floated a rotating premiership with Bahçeli—offering him the prime ministership in the first half of the term—but Bahçeli rejected all such overtures.
The true breaking point came after the 20 July 2015 Suruç bombing, when an ISIS-linked suicide attacker killed 33 leftist youth activists preparing aid for Kobane. Two days later, on 22 July 2015, two Turkish police officers were executed in their beds in Ceylanpınar. The PKK initially claimed the attack as retaliation for Suruç, but later denied central responsibility. Regardless, the killings provided Erdoğan with the justification to formally end the ceasefire. Within days, the government launched airstrikes on PKK positions in northern Iraq while simultaneously cracking down on Kurdish activists inside Turkey.
This sudden escalation of violence created an atmosphere of fear and nationalist fervor. By the November 2015 snap elections, the AKP had successfully reframed the political agenda around “security and survival,” regaining its parliamentary majority. Bahçeli, who had categorically refused to share power with Kılıçdaroğlu just months earlier, gradually aligned with Erdoğan in this environment of polarization and securitization. The groundwork was laid for the AKP–MHP bloc that would later crystallize into the “People’s Alliance.”
Recent events—particularly MHP deputy leader İzzet Ulvi Yönter’s cryptic tributes to exiled mobster Sedat Peker in recent months and, most recently, Devlet Bahçeli’s public defense of underworld figure Selahattin Yılmaz, who was arrested the other day- should not be viewed in isolation. They resurface the same set of controversies that first exploded with the assassination of former Grey Wolves leader Sinan Ateş in December 2022, a political murder widely seen as exposing the violent fault lines inside the nationalist movement. Ateş’s killing triggered unprecedented scrutiny of the overlap between the MHP, state security organs, and organized crime networks.
The fact that these debates have returned with such force suggests that mafia politics continues to determine not only state policy but also the succession battle within the MHP. Yönter’s nod to Peker and Bahçeli’s shielding of Yılmaz form part of a broader pattern in which organized crime figures function as mediators, enforcers, and ultimately kingmakers in leadership transitions. This underscores the fragility of the AKP–MHP alliance, which is less a programmatic coalition than a tactical arrangement sustained through the informal power of mafyokrasi — a system where political authority, security institutions, and the underworld have become inextricably intertwined.
Furthermore, Erdoğan’s dynastic ambitions to secure the succession of his son Bilal Erdoğan have intensified the stakes of this mafia-state nexus. By seeking to depoliticize rival factions and weaken potential challengers, Erdoğan has revived authoritarian techniques once employed against the Gülen movement and applied them to both criminal syndicates and political rivals and allies. In this context, the unresolved question of who will succeed Bahçeli — and whether figures like Yönter, supported by elements of the nationalist mafia, will rise — looms over Turkish politics.
Mafia, State, and Politics in Modern Turkey
The relationship between the Turkish state and organized crime is not new. Its most emblematic figure is Abdullah Çatlı, a Grey Wolves militant who became the archetype of the nationalist gangster. In the 1970s, Çatlı was a leading member of the Ülkü Ocakları (Grey Wolves youth movement), organizing violent street campaigns against leftists during Turkey’s years of political upheaval. He was implicated in political assassinations, arms smuggling, and heroin trafficking, and fled abroad after the 1980 coup. In Europe, he reportedly worked as both a contract killer and drug courier, with allegations of ties to covert NATO “Gladio” structures and the Turkish intelligence service (MIT).
Çatlı’s double life came to an abrupt end in 1996, when he was killed in the infamous Susurluk car crash. The vehicle in which he died also carried a sitting MP (Sedat Bucak, leader of a Kurdish tribal militia aligned with the state) and a senior Istanbul police chief (Hüseyin Kocadağ). The accident exposed what many Turks had long suspected: a clandestine nexus linking the state, security services, nationalist militants, and organized crime in a joint war against the PKK and other perceived enemies of the state. The scandal introduced the term “deep state” (derin devlet) into mainstream political discourse, crystallizing the idea that shadowy networks, rather than elected institutions, often directed Turkish politics.
After Çatlı, the mantle of nationalist mob boss passed to Alaattin Çakıcı, perhaps the most notorious underworld leader of the 1990s. Convicted of ordering assassinations, extortion, and international arms trafficking, Çakıcı nonetheless moved in the highest political circles. His reach was illustrated in 1998, when his men in Hungary physically assaulted then–Prime Minister Mesut Yılmaz, underscoring how mafia networks could directly target sitting leaders. Yet the relationship was not simply hostile. In later testimony, Çakıcı alleged that Yılmaz had also sought his assistance, asking him to take revenge on political enemies and arranging introductions with senior intelligence officials. This contradiction — a prime minister beaten abroad by mafia enforcers, yet relying on the same boss at home — epitomized the double game between politicians and the underworld.
Around the same time, Çakıcı’s voice was captured in the Türkbank wiretaps, where he gave instructions to intimidate businessmen and politicians during the privatization of the bank. In one transcript, he warns: “Tell them, if they defy us, they will pay the price” — a chilling glimpse of mafia leverage in high finance.² When Çakıcı was extradited from Austria in 1999, he told journalists his words would “burn many.” He delivered on that threat before a Turkish parliamentary commission in May 2000, later published in Aksiyon. His testimony implicated both Yılmaz and Tansu Çiller in corrupt dealings around the Türkbank sale, complete with demands for multimillion-dollar kickbacks. He claimed Yılmaz and Güneş Taner—the Minister of State responsible for Economy – had encouraged him to manage the Türkbank privatization. He alleged that Tansu Çiller’s circle also courted him, promising protection if he shifted his loyalties.
He also accused ex-intelligence chief Mehmet Eymür of playing both sides — even plotting to frame him in an attempted assassination of Doğu Perinçek — and boasted of arranging television appearances to tilt political balances. At one point, he claimed that Turkish intermediaries (at the request of Mesut Yilmaz) had approached American officials with an extraordinary proposal: to hand him over in exchange for Osama bin Laden, whose capture or death was being pursued in Afghanistan through General Abdul Rashid Dostum, the Uzbek warlord long connected to both Ankara and Turkish intelligence. According to his account, the Americans declined the offer. The fallout was devastating: Yılmaz’s government collapsed in the wake of the Türkbank scandal, marking one of the clearest moments where mafia revelations brought down a sitting administration.
Politically, Çakıcı’s stance shifted with time. From prison in the 2000s and 2010s, he frequently lashed out at both Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Devlet Bahçeli. In one handwritten letter smuggled from his cell in 2002, he called Erdoğan “a tyrant in the making who will sacrifice the Turkish nation for his personal ambition.” In another, directed at Bahçeli in 2010, he scorned him as “a man who has abandoned the Ülkücü cause and betrayed the martyrs of the movement.” These statements painted him as an unrepentant nationalist dissident, estranged from both state and party elites.
Yet after his conditional release in 2020 — pushed through parliament with Bahçeli’s personal lobbying under the COVID-19 amnesty law (nicknamed “Çakıcı’s law”) — his rhetoric flipped entirely. He issued a letter of praise, declaring: “Devlet Bahçeli is the true guardian of the Turkish nation. I stand with him and with our President Erdoğan against all threats.” In another statement from late 2020, he accused CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu of treason, effectively positioning himself as Bahçeli’s street-level enforcer. The contrast with his prison-era criticisms could not have been sharper.
It was in this same period that Sedat Peker rose to prominence as another key mafia figure straddling politics and crime. Like Çakıcı, Peker was a convicted mob boss from the 1990s with a reputation for violence and extortion. But in the 2010s, he rebranded himself as a fervent Erdoğan supporter, giving fiery speeches to pro-AKP crowds in which he threatened academics, journalists, and opposition figures. In one notorious 2016 address, he warned academics who signed the “Peace Petition”: “We will shower in your blood.” His role as a populist enforcer made him both useful and dangerous to the ruling bloc.
By 2020, Peker had fallen out with the regime and fled abroad. From exile, mostly in Dubai, he released a series of YouTube videos in 2021 that attracted millions of viewers. In them, he detailed networks of corruption and illicit dealings implicating senior AKP and MHP figures — from drug smuggling routes through the Middle East and Balkans, to the role of Berat Albayrak (Erdoğan’s son-in-law) in dubious business ventures, to allegations that former interior minister Mehmet Ağar and his circle had turned the Yalıkavak Marina into a hub for laundering dirty money. He even implicated Süleyman Soylu, the powerful interior minister, accusing him of shielding gangs and betraying their past deals. These revelations temporarily destabilized the Erdoğan government, though Peker himself was eventually silenced under Emirati pressure.
Together, Çatlı, Çakıcı, and Peker form a continuum of mafyokrasi in modern Turkey. Çatlı embodied the deep state of the Cold War era; Çakıcı symbolized the hybrid of mafia, politics, and intelligence in the 1990s; Peker represented the digitized, media-savvy mafia boss of the 2010s and 2020s, capable of mobilizing millions online. What unites them is not just their criminality but their political functionality: they have served as enforcers, fundraisers, and narrative-shapers, ensuring the survival of ruling elites in moments of crisis.
The AKP’s rise in 2002 initially threatened these networks. Erdoğan’s alliance with the Gülen movement launched the Ergenekon and Balyoz trials, sidelining many deep-state actors, including nationalist militants and mafia bosses. However, the collapse of that partnership in 2013, along with the staged coup attempt in 2016, compelled Erdoğan to seek support from Bahçeli and the Ergenekon network. In this turn, the mafia — from Çakıcı to Sedat Peker — returned as both a stabilizing and destabilizing force, acting as agents of the deep state.
The Return of the 1990s
For many Turks, Bahçeli’s embrace of Çakıcı was a chilling déjà vu. The spectacle recalled the murky alliances of the 1990s — an era when mobsters, security officials, and politicians operated in a twilight zone of covert operations, dirty money, and political blackmail.
Back then, Çakıcı’s name was whispered in connection with unsolved murders, gangland executions, and shadowy missions abroad. He worked with Korkut Eken, a former intelligence officer, and was, by the admission of ex-MİT officials like Mehmet Eymür, occasionally “used by the state” for tasks ranging from information-gathering to intimidation. Like his rival Sedat Peker, who later turned whistleblower, Çakıcı epitomized the state’s Faustian bargain with organized crime: outsource deniable violence to gangsters, then protect them from justice when convenient.
To understand why a man like Çakıcı could return to the political scene, one must recognize Devlet Bahçeli’s role in Erdoğan’s system as explained above. Bahçeli, who was once a marginal figure leading a dwindling nationalist party, emerged as a kingmaker following the 2015 general elections, especially after the staged coup in 2016. By endorsing Erdoğan’s push for a hyper-presidential system, he made the votes of the MHP essential in every national contest.
Some assumed that Erdoğan’s rise in 2002 would end the entrenched nexus between politics and the mafia. His early reforms, the promise of EU accession, and a strong anti-corruption discourse fed hopes of a clean break from the past. Yet Erdoğan’s system did not dismantle what many call mafyokrasi—it simply monopolized it.
In the 1990s, fragile coalition governments oversaw a fragmented underworld in which multiple mafia clans competed for influence. Under the AKP, this dynamic shifted: patronage was centralized through mega-projects such as bridges, airports, and canals, with kickbacks channeled upward into a single-party pyramid. The system also took on a paramilitary dimension. Organizations like SADAT, a shadowy security consultancy, blurred the line between private militia and state force, recalling the earlier role played by the Grey Wolves.
Mafia figures were drawn into this structure when convenient and cast aside when they posed a threat. Sedat Peker, for instance, was courted when his support served the government’s needs but discarded once his revelations risked destabilizing the system. His exposes often functioned as controlled safety valves, selectively exposing corruption to weaken rivals while keeping the broader framework intact.
Meanwhile, the nationalist wing of the establishment ensured protection for its own figures. The MHP’s alliance with Erdoğan guaranteed that men like Alaattin Çakıcı, emblematic of Turkey’s nationalist underworld, were rehabilitated rather than purged.
From Sinan Ateş to Selahattin Yılmaz: The Succession Question
The relevance of this history to today’s succession dilemmas is stark. Just as Türkeş’s death in 1997 triggered an internal struggle—eventually producing Bahçeli as the unlikely victor—so too does Bahçeli’s own aging and Erdoğan’s dynastic ambitions create a looming crisis.
Devlet Bahçeli has ruled the MHP since 1997, surviving ‘coups’, party splits, and the humiliations of electoral marginalization. His iron grip has long rested not on charisma—Bahçeli is famously colorless—but on his ability to broker alliances with the state’s coercive apparatus. Under his stewardship, the MHP transformed from the violent street movement of the 1970s Grey Wolves into a parliamentary partner of convenience for whoever needed nationalist legitimacy. In the 1999 elections, the party surged to 18 percent, only to crash below the threshold in 2002. Yet Bahçeli endured, even when rivals such as Meral Akşener attempted to pry the party from his grasp.
But time is undefeated. At 77, Bahçeli’s health is visibly declining. The question is not only who takes the podium, but who controls the mafyokrasi: the networks of party, militia, and mafia that underpin real power.
When Bahçeli praised nationalist underboss Selahattin Yılmaz today as a “fearless Turk,” and his lieutenant İzzet Ulvi Yönter framed the MHP as the only guarantor of the republic’s survival, they were not just speaking in metaphors. They were signaling that the deep state—rooted in the Grey Wolves, fertilized by heroin routes, sustained by privatization rackets—is alive and awaiting its next leader.
Bahçeli described Selahattin Yılmaz—a shadowy ultranationalist figure with deep ties to Turkey’s underworld—as his “dava arkadaşı,” or “comrade in the cause.” The phrase was not chosen lightly: in the lexicon of Turkish nationalism, “dava arkadaşı” is a term of sacred fraternity, connoting loyalty forged through decades of struggle.
Bahçeli highlighted CHP leader Özgür Özel’s description of Yılmaz as a “hired killer and assassin,” framing it as a political message.
“It is a grave slander, baseless and unfounded, to claim that the MHP is being manipulated through the Selahattin Yılmaz case. No one can set direction for the MHP. To put it plainly and repeat: Selahattin Yılmaz is my comrade and brother in cause,” Bahçeli said.
Close behind, İzzet Ulvi Yönter, Bahçeli’s long-time lieutenant and current parliamentary group leader, reinforced the message in his own statements. Declaring that “the cause will not be orphaned,” Yönter positioned himself as the guardian of Bahçeli’s legacy and as the natural heir to MHP’s throne. But his words, too, carried an edge. In Turkey’s fraught political lexicon, where mafia dons and ministers often speak in interchangeable idioms, Yönter’s tone was less about continuity than about control—about who could mobilize muscle and loyalty in equal measure once Bahçeli’s frail body inevitably fails him.
MHP Deputy Chairman Yönter also recently reignited speculation over nationalist figure Sedat Peker’s potential return to Turkey. He posted a video showing Peker standing by the sea, accompanied by the cryptic note: “Everything has its time… Regards to those who wait for their appointed hour… Allah suffices, transient desires…” The post came shortly after a high-level face-to-face meeting between President Erdoğan and MHP leader Devlet Bahçeli, drawing attention to its timing. He also published a collage combining his photo with an image of Sedat Peker giving a salute with his hand on his chest. The post contained no written statement but was accompanied by the Plevna March, a piece strongly associated with nationalist symbolism in Turkey.
MHP-Peker interactions go back to February, when Sedat Peker sent get-well-soon wishes to Bahçeli following his surgery. The message was later reshared by MHP’s press advisor Yıldıray Çiçek, and MP Baki Ersoy. In response, Yönter highlighted Peker’s charitable contributions—such as donating TL 1.8 million for the treatment of paralyzed ex-OPU officer Ömer Korkmaz—on social media, offering a public acknowledgment. Yönter also reposted Peker’s reported act of buying a house for a deceased soldier’s family.
The assassination of Sinan Ateş in December 2022 revealed the looming succession crisis within the MHP. Once the head of the Grey Wolves, Ateş was gunned down in Ankara in broad daylight. His widow, Ayşe Ateş, has since charged senior MHP figures with orchestrating the killing and obstructing justice. Erdoğan’s decision to receive her—over Bahçeli’s objections—went beyond responding to public outrage. It signalled that even the AKP could no longer indefinitely shield suspects linked to the MHP, laying bare the fragility of their alliance and sharpening the question of who will inherit Bahçeli’s mantle.
Ateş, a young and charismatic figure with academic credentials, was widely viewed as a potential challenger to Bahçeli’s leadership and a bridge between nationalist youth and broader conservative circles. His murder in Ankara, widely attributed to intra-MHP rivalries and underworld involvement, underscored how mafia-state networks regulate leadership succession not only through patronage but also through violence.
As we at News About Turkey (NAT) have previously argued, Bahçeli’s close associates—many of whom are implicated in the Ateş case—have vested interests in shaping the post-Bahçeli leadership transition. The Selahattin Yılmaz affair is therefore not a new problem but part of the same continuum. Just as the Ateş murder exposed the MHP’s entanglement with violent networks, Yılmaz’s case underscores the party’s reliance on cadres who blur the line between political loyalty and criminal enforcement.
Beyond the immediate AKP–MHP tensions lies Erdoğan’s own succession dilemma. At 71, the president is increasingly preoccupied with ensuring the continuity of his rule through his family. Bilal Erdoğan, his son, has been quietly groomed for political office through roles in youth foundations, NGOs like TÜRGEV, and international cultural diplomacy. Yet Bilal lacks his father’s charisma, oratorical skill, and ruthless pragmatism.
There are also growing signs that Erdoğan is quietly grooming Meral Akşener—former İYİ Party leader and MHP dissident—for a return to the nationalist fold under his terms, while also positioning his son as his eventual successor.
Such actions are met with significant apprehension by Bahçeli’s current associates. Akşener’s return would be considered a humiliation. For Bahçeli’s loyal supporters, defending individuals like Yılmaz is not merely about one man’s innocence; it is about safeguarding the networks and loyalties that could ensure their survival once Bahçeli is no longer in power.
To secure Bilal’s future, Erdoğan has pursued a strategy of systematic depoliticization: crushing opposition mayors like Ekrem İmamoğlu and fragmenting the mafia networks that might otherwise back alternative leaders. In other words, Erdoğan is using loyalists to manage rather than dismantle the mafia while ensuring no figure grows powerful enough to challenge Bilal’s eventual succession.
In this regard, the defence of Selahattin Yılmaz is not an isolated scandal. It is the latest symptom of a deeper malaise: a partnership sustained by survival, poisoned by mistrust, and destabilized by succession anxiety. Bahçeli protects his followers not just out of conviction but because his inner circle knows their future is at stake. Erdoğan tolerates these scandals because he still needs the numbers—but his long game suggests he is preparing for a post-Bahçeli landscape where most of the MHP’s current leaders have no place.
By: News About Turkey (NAT)
