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First Gülenists, Then Furkan, Now Süleymancılar: The Selective Democracy and Political Betrayal of Turkey’s Secular Opposition

Turkey’s secular opposition has never had more reason to understand the dangers of a politicized judiciary than it does today. Since late 2024, the Republican People’s Party has been subjected to what international rights organizations and opposition figures describe as an unprecedented judicial offensive. Hundreds of CHP members, municipal employees and elected officials have been detained or jailed in successive investigations. Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s most formidable electoral rival, was detained in March 2025 and remains imprisoned while standing trial in an enormous corruption case involving more than 400 defendants. His university diploma—a legal requirement for presidential candidacy—was annulled immediately before his detention. İmamoğlu denies the charges against him, which include allegations that he headed a criminal organization involved in bribery and tender manipulation, and argues that the cases are designed to remove Erdoğan’s strongest potential challenger from politics. Human Rights Watch has described the broader campaign against the CHP as an unprecedented assault on the main opposition, while Erdoğan’s government rejects accusations of political interference and insists that Turkish prosecutors and courts operate independently. Nor did the pressure stop with İmamoğlu. Successive operations reached CHP-run municipalities across the country. By July 2025, a Reuters review had counted roughly 500 people detained in the widening investigations, at least 220 jailed and 14 elected opposition mayors imprisoned pending trial. The campaign continued into 2026. On July 30, police detained Etimesgut Mayor Erdal Beşikçioğlu, along with dozens of others, in another operation concerning alleged municipal irregularities. The Associated Press noted that hundreds of elected mayors and officials had been arrested during the preceding two years in investigations overwhelmingly affecting opposition-run municipalities. Then the judiciary reached the CHP as an institution. On May 21, 2026, an Ankara appeals court annulled the CHP’s 2023 congress, effectively removing Özgür Özel from the chairmanship and restoring former leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu. The decision reversed an earlier ruling that had rejected allegations of misconduct surrounding the congress and plunged Turkey’s largest opposition party into an extraordinary leadership crisis. Özel called the intervention a judicial attack on the electorate’s will, while tens of thousands later demonstrated in Ankara in his support. Unable to regain control of the CHP, Özel left and, together with 90 former CHP lawmakers, established Yeni Parti on July 24. İmamoğlu, from prison, resigned his 17-year CHP membership and joined the new formation on August 13, declaring that a “new path” was being opened toward a more democratic Turkey. Reuters described the breakup as the culmination of an unprecedented legal crackdown that had jailed hundreds of CHP members and elected officials since 2024. There can therefore be little doubt that Özel, İmamoğlu and the political movement surrounding them understand what they mean when they speak about politically motivated prosecutions, guilt by association, prejudicial media coverage, prolonged detention and the manipulation of judicial institutions to reshape politics. They have experienced it themselves. And that is precisely why their response to the treatment of other communities deserves scrutiny. The central problem facing both the restored CHP under Kılıçdaroğlu and Özel’s supposedly new political movement is not that they criticize Erdoğan too strongly. It is that the democratic principles they invoke against Erdoğan too often appear strongest when they themselves are the targets. When the state turns against people who come from outside the traditional secular opposition universe—particularly independent Islamic movements—the same instinctive demand for evidence, proportionality, individual responsibility and presumption of innocence frequently becomes weaker. First it happened to Gülenists. Then to Alparslan Kuytul and Furkan. Now the same question confronts the Süleymancılar. The movements are very different and should not be treated as politically or organizationally identical. Their individual legal cases are also different. But the recurring political lesson is difficult to ignore: religious communities that establish political independence from Erdoğan can find themselves facing overwhelming state power, while Turkey’s secular opposition repeatedly fails to convince them that an opposition government would regard their rights as part of its own democratic struggle. That failure does not merely betray those communities. It helps Erdoğan keep them. Erdoğan’s offensive against the CHP should have changed the opposition The scale of the current campaign against the CHP makes its failure to learn from earlier victims particularly striking. Özel himself has argued that Erdoğan’s strategy is to leave the opposition without its strongest candidate, without its chosen leadership and ultimately without the organizational capacity to compete. In June, while still fighting the court intervention into the CHP congress, he described the government’s electoral strategy as leaving the party that could defeat Erdoğan “without a candidate, without an institution and without a leader.” Whether one accepts every element of Özel’s interpretation or not, the political sequence is extraordinary. Erdoğan’s principal rival is in prison. İmamoğlu’s diploma has been cancelled. Hundreds of party officials and municipal employees have been detained. Mayors have been removed or jailed. The CHP congress that replaced Kılıçdaroğlu with Özel was annulled by the courts. Özel ultimately abandoned the party altogether and created a new one. By August 2026, Turkey’s main opposition had effectively been split into two organizations after years of judicial pressure. This should have generated something larger than outrage over the treatment of CHP. It should have produced a fundamental reconsideration of the political and judicial system that made such an offensive possible. Instead, much of the opposition continues to behave as though Erdoğan’s authoritarianism began when prosecutors arrived at CHP municipalities. It did not. The structures, narratives and political habits that made today’s repression possible were normalized much earlier—and the opposition itself participated in some of that normalization. July 15 created the political architecture The decisive turning point was July 15, 2016. There is no dispute that military forces attempted to overturn the elected government, that parliament was attacked and that people were killed. But acknowledging those facts is different from accepting every aspect of the political interpretation Erdoğan subsequently imposed on the country. Fethullah Gülen denied directing the attempted coup until his death. The much stronger claim advanced by some…