A rights watchdog said on Saturday that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government was undermining democracy with “abusive tactics” against the main opposition party.
Thirteen members of the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) were arrested earlier on Saturday in several Turkish regions, the Istanbul prosecutor’s office said.
The moves were part of an official probe that had led on Thursday to the party’s leadership being ousted by court order, it said. Human Rights Watch called the court order “the latest deeply damaging blow to the rule of law, democracy and human rights” in Turkey.
The NGO said this was part of “the ongoing abusive tactics by the Erdogan government to remove the CHP as a political force”. Last year, Turkish authorities jailed Erdogan’s main political rival, Istanbul mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, who was the CHP’s candidate for the presidential election due in 2028.
Thousands of people protested in Ankara and Istanbul on Friday against the court order, which annulled a 2023 CHP leadership election on the basis of alleged vote-buying.
The order cancelled the victory of CHP head Ozgur Ozel and named the party’s former chair Kemal Kilicdaroglu — a lacklustre figure who chalked up a string of electoral defeats — as interim leader.
