Turkiye: If we have the power to successfully stop everyday life, why do we need the Congress?
The annulment decision targeting a CHP party congress and the attempts to reinstall former chair Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu at the head of the party through the judiciary, acting on orders from Erdoğan’s Palace like a court-appointed guardian, is proof that the institutions and constitutional order of the bourgeois regime in Türkiye have ceased to function even at a symbolic level. The Supreme Election Council (YSK), which since 1950 existed as the guarantor of electoral security within bourgeois democracy, has now become a direct apparatus of the Palace judiciary. What we face is not a legal process but a political coup; therefore, these decisions are illegitimate. Yet merely stating this does not solve the problem. The solution lies in organizing a broader and more radical united struggle rising from the streets.
This is a regime of the sword
1. The AKP-MHP regime, having lost mass support and facing the possibility of losing power, now relies for its survival on the oligarchic layers of energy, arms, and finance barons, on paramilitary forces, mafia networks, and imperialist capital. To preserve this regime of plunder, it would not hesitate to shut down the main opposition party or reduce elections to a mere Russian-style formality if necessary.
2. Precisely because of these dynamics, we define the current order as a “regime of the sword”, a form of Bonapartism. The prospect of a regional war, the deepening economic crisis, and the structural needs of capital have produced a regime that swings the sword internally against the working class and the opposition while nurturing expansionist aggression abroad. The capitalist bloc is determined not to hand power over to a relatively liberal and democratic CHP. Any transfer of power they could tolerate would only be to more nationalist or more authoritarian factions.
The reason for this resistance is clear: they require absolute immunity to cover up the historic crimes they have committed. They need an apparatus capable of guaranteeing the billions of dollars they have stolen from us and transferred into their own coffers. Under the protection of that apparatus, they can continue plundering our mountains and waters, laundering black money, and sustaining wealth transfers through stock market manipulation.
3. The regime began taking shape after the June 7, 2015 elections, became openly unconstitutional following the failed coup attempt of July 15, consolidated itself through the 2016 presidential process, the 2017 referendum, and the 2018 presidential elections. During this process, the state and the AKP/MHP apparatus effectively merged into one, and the separation of powers disappeared. Naturally, the symbol of the new regime is the Palace, and its leadership is embodied by Erdoğan and Bahçeli.
4. The AKP-MHP government (Erdoğan-Bahçeli) suffered a major defeat in the March 31, 2024 elections, losing major municipalities, while the AKP fell to second place for the first time in 22 years. It also experienced significant losses within its traditional base. Unable to accept this defeat, the Palace first replaced the Istanbul Chief Public Prosecutor and then appointed a trustee to the Esenyurt municipality. This political coup deepened with the arrest of the Istanbul Metropolitan Mayor in March 2025; dozens of municipalities were either seized through the judiciary or forced into party defections through blackmail.
5. Parallel to this process, parliamentary transfers were engineered in order to secure a legislative majority, while the Kurdish political movement and the DEM Party were drawn into discussions around a false “opening” and peace process.
6. The process accelerated further after İmamoğlu’s arrest in March 2025. The AKP’s inability to manufacture the social consent it desired, the erosion of its vote base amid deepening economic crisis, the growing alienation of youth from the regime, and the fact that the CHP under Özgür Özel remained standing despite waves of arrests against the opposition, all of this pushed Erdoğan to launch a new wave of aggression, this time with the judiciary fully at his side.
The Hopes and Actions of the Bourgeois Opposition Are Insufficient
7. Under Özgür Özel’s leadership, the CHP has remained standing, but its attempt to contain the angry masses and fend off the judicial coup has proven insufficient. The mass movement has lost its energy through passive forms of action. While Özgür Özel uses rhetoric about “stopping life [as we know it]” and strikes as a threat, he hesitates to put them into practice and risks losing the party altogether. If we truly want to stop the regime and the government, we must stop threatening to shut down everyday life, and immediately shut it down in practice.
8. The courts and the Supreme Election Council are under the unconditional command of the current regime, Erdoğan, and the capitalist oligarchy. In this context, hopes invested in the ballot box and elections are rapidly evaporating. Türkiye is losing even its character as a country governed through flawed elections. In a situation where even the opposition’s candidate is effectively chosen by the Palace, elections are turning into a ridiculous theater. As electoral politics lose their function, the opposition itself is being redesigned. Naturally, this is not merely an internal CHP issue, but a vital matter directly concerning revolutionary class politics as well. We are sick and tired of liberal chatter that does nothing but wait for elections and point endlessly toward the ballot box.
9. The bourgeois opposition continues to place its hopes in capital markets, stock fluctuations, and the flight of foreign investment. Yet the bourgeoisie always positions itself according to its own class interests and inevitably finds ways to adapt to new conditions. The impoverishment of the people does not concern them in the slightest; the people can change this fate only through their own strength and will. Markets can recover within a day through the interventions of stock market speculators. Just as this regime did not collapse because of previous economic turbulence, neither will it fall solely due to economic crisis.
10. One reason for the regime’s increasingly reckless aggression lies in domestic dynamics; another lies in global developments that have opened the way for the Palace. Trump continues to support Erdoğan as a strong ally. Thus, even if the regime lacks the consent of the people, it fully enjoys the consent and approval of imperialism. The European Union no longer even comments on developments. The fact that the upcoming NATO summit will take place in Türkiye, and that Türkiye stands ready to serve as the forward outpost of Western defense, prevents imperialist centers from confronting Erdoğan. Europe’s priority is not democracy but security, migration, and stability.
11. The Palace regime is systematically crushing every point of resistance within society. Partial and localized upsurges in the class struggle remain insufficient to create a general rupture. The Kurdish political movement has first been subdued through a massive wave of arrests and then pushed into silence through the illusion of a false opening process. The women’s movement is losing organizational strength. The dynamism of the youth movement, which took over the streets in March 2025, has been suppressed both by the coercive apparatuses of the state and by the bourgeois opposition itself. This entire process is accompanied by an active “redesign of the opposition” orchestrated directly by the Palace. A secular nationalist opposition bloc is being prepared to replace the CHP, while secular nationalists are being pushed into the natural fields of struggle of the socialist movement. The young masses who break away from a captured CHP will be channeled into these secular nationalist parties. This strategy aims to sever completely the youth and street-oriented arteries of the opposition.
More Audacity
12. Socialists, trade unions, democratic mass organizations, and the working people must abandon the strategy of merely “supporting the CHP” against the regime. Because the CHP is not a party capable of fundamentally transforming this regime. Of course, the CHP is the principal victim of the regime in this process and still remains our ally in street struggle against it.
Moreover, the CHP itself may disintegrate amid its internal conflicts. There is a high probability that elections will become entirely dysfunctional. For the last year, all mass energy has been squandered around the CHP, and unfortunately the current situation still contains this danger.
13. Despite its aggression, the regime is fragile; it is supported by an increasingly shrinking minority. What the regime truly fears are the direct actions of working people. From the miners of Doruk to Sub-Med, from the Akbelen resistance to Temel Conta, from Migros workers to the students of Bilgi University, the line connecting these struggles is also the regime’s greatest nightmare.
14. The unions remain under the control of bureaucratic apparatuses. Socialists have failed to construct a powerful third front. This situation may generate hopelessness within the mass movement.
Yet only an independent, working-class front can assume the role of revolutionary leadership. An Anti-Imperialist, Anti-Capitalist, and Democratic Front can build a genuine line of resistance against the regime.
15. Every crisis produces its own leaderships. Within this suffocating situation, the mass movement too will create its own revolutionary leaders. The vanguard of the working class and youth must display greater audacity and step forward for a united workers’ front. Under the leadership of such a front, a de facto democratic transformation could begin. Otherwise, the regime of repression will only grow stronger.
Since the Gezi Resistance, the socialist movement in Türkiye has constantly searched for shortcuts. The time has now come to walk the long road, to organize the mass movement around militant grassroots organizations.
What we need is a program that inspires hope, an unshakable unity, and a bold revolutionary leadership.
First published here by Marksizm Şimdi
