I do not write about Turkey as a foreign matter. Turkey is the neighbour that decides things in northern Syria every day, drawing the lines of influence and steering the course of both war and settlement. To understand Turkish intervention in Syria, one must first understand Turkish domestic politics. I therefore follow developments within the Turkish opposition not as a spectator but as a Syrian politician who knows that every shift in Ankara reaches us. And there is no doubt where I stand: with the will of the delegates against judicial confiscation, and with an opposition fighting to take back its own decisions — because defeating the logic of guardianship there opens the road to defeating it across our whole region.
What has happened within the Republican People’s Party is not a revolt against its leadership. It is an act of political engineering, carried out by Erdoğan with precision. Erdogan did not wait for the opposition to divide; he pushed it into division, because a divided opposition is easier to handle than one rebuilding itself into a united front. The instruments of that engineering are in plain sight, and the sequence of events alone answers anyone who calls it coincidence. The assault on the opposition began more than a year before the court’s ruling, It started with the imprisonment of Ekrem İmamoğlu in March 2025, followed by the jailing of dozens of mayors. In September of the same year, the Istanbul branch was placed under a court-appointed trustee, alongside a stream of cases against MPs and district mayors — all to paralyse the opposition established leaders first, then to drain its time and lock it into an exhausting cycle of defence, and finally to move against the party itself.
Erdoğan’s shift from targeting individuals to targeting the party was not a choice but a necessity. When he imprisoned İmamoğlu he assumed he had removed the only rival capable of beating him. Instead Özgür Özel filled the vacuum with a different set of tools: an unbroken presence on the ground, a message aimed at voter’s pockets rather than his identities, and an ability to travel and to gather crowds that Erdoğan himself no longer possesses. Unable to silence him in the open, he turned to the courts.
On 21 May 2026, the Ankara Regional Court of Appeal declared the congress that elected Özel in late 2023 an absolute nullity, and extended the effect down the chain until it swallowed everything built upon it — the extraordinary congresses that followed, the amendments to the party statute, the party’s decisions — all of it deemed never to have existed. Özel was not merely removed by a single ruling; three years of the party’s life were erased at once. Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu was returned to the chairmanship by a judge’s decision rather than a delegate’s vote, and the police enforced the ruling by seizing the headquarters. Even the Supreme Election Council washed its hands of it when Özel’s team turned to it, referring them to the Court of Cassation and leaving the party suspended in a vacuum of legitimacy. The judiciary thereby planted two leaderships and two rival centres of legitimacy within the opposition, and an opposition without a single recognised leadership cannot fight.
At the same time the Palace gambled on prolonging the disputes over the legitimacy of congresses, so that the opposition would be consumed by procedural battles instead of the issues that actually hurt the government: the economy and the cost of living. Its state media threw their full weight behind a narrative of division and chaos, while the threat of imposing court-appointed trustees on municipalities was kept permanently in the air to spread fear among the opposition’s supporters.
The opposition, however, did not walk into the trap. It distributed its parliamentary weight by design, not by the accident of a split. The New Party, launched formally on 24 July, the anniversary of the Treaty of Lausanne, with a bloc of 91 MPs, secured its position as the principal opposition force in parliament, lifted the threat of parliamentary marginalisation, and took sole charge of the confrontation in the field and of the economic and public services. The bloc that stayed behind in the historic party, 44 MPs, remained there with a clear task: to stop the appeasement wing from taking sole possession of the party seal, from disposing of its properties and its treasury funding, or from entering side alliances that serve the government’s agenda. The division here is not the product of a quarrel; it is a calculated allocation of roles. And when the judicial assault intensified, Özel and his deputies did not withdraw. They kept up their presence outside the courthouses, accompanying the cadres who had been targeted, turning every summons into a public demonstration that exposed the politicisation of the judiciary in the public eye.
Then the numbers laid the whole gamble bare. Erdoğan bet on closing off every route to change inside the party. The numbers proved he had miscounted — and proved, too, that he has no need of numbers so long as he holds the courts. The Law on Political Parties requires the signatures of only one-fifth of the convention’s 1,368 delegates to force an extraordinary congress; the legal quorum was reached within the first hours of the signature drive, and the final tally came to 833 notarised signatures, three times the threshold and more than two-thirds of the entire convention, delivered to the party headquarters on 17 June — with the Istanbul delegates, whose votes the courts had confiscated by annulling their provincial congress, still to be added. The appeasement wing’s refusal to convene was therefore no longer an organisational disagreement but an open breach of the law.
The Palace answered with its favourite weapon: time. Article 14 of the Law on Political Parties requires a general congress at least once every three years, and annulling the congresses of 2023 and returning the party to the pre-2023 position pushes it outside the statutory window and towards losing its electoral eligibility — a danger Özel’s own team acknowledged and declared itself prepared for. Even the date Özel set for the congress in July was killed off by injunction. And here the real equation stood exposed: whoever holds the delegates holds legitimacy, but whoever holds the courts holds time. Özel understood that to go on fighting for the seal alone was to accept playing on his opponent’s ground and by his opponent’s clock.
This is why the New Party was never a rupture, but the pressure card that changed the game. Özel built a decision tree rather than a single trap, and he is now moving towards two congresses along two tracks. The first is in his own hands and on his own timetable: the founding convention of the New Party in late September, which will complete its organisation across the provinces, secure its electoral eligibility and elect its leadership bodies, while most of the provincial chairmen dismissed for opposing the annulment are restored and mayors continue to declare for it. The second lies with the law: the extraordinary congress of the historic party, forced by 833 delegates whose signatures the appeasement wing ignored, so that the decision has passed to the Civil Court of Peace, which must appoint a convening committee of three delegates whose sole task is to hold it, and to the Court of Cassation, where the nullity case awaits the end of the judicial recess. Özel’s camp holds that the constitution vests supervision of party congresses in the Supreme Election Council and not in the civil courts, exposing the judiciary’s seizure of a jurisdiction that was never its own. Against this, the appeasement wing has opened a parallel track: an ordinary congress beginning in September and running for months of delegate elections, presented as reorganisation and intended in fact to replace the delegates loyal to Özel and to buy the Palace time.
So the fate of the movement now hangs on a single question: will the extraordinary congress be held or not? If the Court of Cassation overturns the nullity ruling, or the Civil Court of Peace appoints the convening committee, the congress takes place and Özel returns to his historic home with his overwhelming majority, thereby recovering the party seal and, with it, its heritage, its buildings and its treasury funding. If the obstruction continues, he proceeds with a New Party in full possession of its electoral eligibility, leaving his opponents a seal without a base and a structure without legitimacy.
The heart of this equation is that the seal itself has lost its value in the hands of those now holding it. The opposition’s voters, whose primary concern is removing Erdoğan, do not vote for a historic emblem; they vote for whoever embodies the fight. And Kılıçdaroğlu — returned to the chairmanship by a court ruling rather than by the votes of the delegates, and then dismissing Özel’s cadres and installing his own — does not look to his own supporters like a leader who recovered his party, but like a man to whom the judiciary handed it. The party’s name in his hands has become an accusation, not a mandate.
On either track, Özel’s ground strategy rests on four pillars. Full administrative disclosure, obliging opposition municipalities to publish their contracts and tenders openly, which strips the corruption pretext from the courts. A push into the rural strongholds, shifting the centre of political activity towards the agricultural provinces and the smaller industrial towns — the heartlands of the Justice and Development Party — with inflation and poverty as its message. A robust parliamentary and legal shield protecting the targeted cadres and documenting violations, so as to raise the cost of imposing administrative trusteeship. And finally a discourse that removes national security from political bidding altogether: Özel declares that ending terrorism is not a field of competition, hostility or opposition but a shared historic responsibility, and demands in return judicial and democratic reform grounded in the rulings of the Constitutional Court and the European Court of Human Rights, extending the vision to the neighbourhood by speaking of a future in which the Kurds of Syria, Iraq and Iran live in their own countries as equals, thereby depriving the Palace of the national-security pretext it uses to evade its domestic failures.
The Palace wanted to force Özel to choose between a confiscated party and a newborn one. Özel answered by taking both, deferring the reckoning to a time of his choosing rather than the one imposed by the courts.
When the organisational freeze failed to break the movement, the Palace moved to its most dangerous option: the politicisation of bribery allegations. It set its public prosecutor to draw up a motion to lift Özel’s immunity on allegations of repeated bribery and send it to the Ministry of Justice. The political weaponisation of bribery allegations moves the battle from the terrain of liberty to the terrain of morality, where it does not make a hero of the opponent as charges of opinion and state security do, but strikes at the most valuable thing the opposition owns in the eyes of voters worn down by inflation: the integrity that made it the alternative to a government sunk in corruption. The Palace is not putting Özel on trial. It is borrowing his tongue: it wants the word corruption to be an accusation made about the opposition rather than about itself.
Faced with this escalation, three paths open before Turkey. The most likely is that the Palace presses ahead and the move rebounds on it: Özel is in a position to turn the prosecution into an engine for the street, moving the confrontation from a parliament controlled by the Palace’s majority to open sit-ins outside the courthouses, until the cost of jailing him rises to the point where convicting him costs the government more than leaving him free. The second, and the most dangerous, is that the state rushes towards swift rulings — a political ban or immediate detention — while the pressure of the economy and the cost of living bears down at the same time; the resentment then breaks out of every political framework that might contain it and turns into an open confrontation in the streets between an angry public and the machinery of the state. The third is the most cunning at first sight but is the shortest-lived in reality: that the Palace neither proceeds nor retreats, but keeps the case hanging over Özel’s head and leaks allegations of financial wrongdoing through its media month after month, to keep the opposition defending itself. Yet this wager turns against the one who makes it, because an accusation that never reaches a verdict loses its power to convince, and every fresh leak becomes further evidence that the judiciary works to order. A government that bets on wearing its opponent down with time forgets that time is working against it too: every month that passes adds another page to the inflation bill, and turns the public’s disgust with the Palace into a decision at the ballot box.
Electorally, the Palace set a trap to split the opposition’s vote, but it misread the direction of the split. The division does not cut the electorate between two comparable parties; it sorts it. The parliamentary bloc, the municipalities, the cadres and the street on one side, and the seal alone on the other. The opposition voter whose concern is removing Erdoğan is not looking for the party’s legal heir, but for whoever is fighting the battle. The split therefore works for the New Party, not against it. What remains with the historic party is its name, its heritage, its buildings and a leadership installed by court order; the voters, the cadres and the municipalities have gone to the other side. And whether the movement returns to its historic home or continues through its new party, the electoral project is one: a single economic programme, an agreed presidential candidate, and joint lists wherever the marginal seats are decided — depriving the Palace’s media machine of its favourite material, the image of a divided opposition.
Behind all this engineering lies something simpler than it appears: Erdoğan no longer has his old instruments. The man who built his victories by moving from province to province and addressing crowds in one square after another can no longer sustain the punishing campaigns that were his sharpest weapon. And a man who cannot face his opponent in the squares faces him in the courts. Resorting to the judiciary is evidence of weakness, not of strength — a silent admission that he no longer trusts his ability to defeat Özel on ground where they stand as equals. A possible electoral victory would therefore change the equation only temporarily: a power built on one man ages as that man ages, and a party emptied of every figure who might have carried on after him has no successor combining his charisma with his political cunning. The movement facing him, meanwhile, enters the contest with a leadership in its fifties, cadres in their forties, and a street younger than both. The contest, then, is not between two parties. It is between a man spending the last of his credit and a movement still building its first.
What remains is the wider lesson, and it is the one that concerns us as Syrians. In Turkey the Palace confiscates a party’s seal, obstructs a congress mandated by two-thirds of its delegates, determines by a judge’s ruling who leads the opposition and when it may meet, and imprisons the mayor of the country’s largest city. This is not a party dispute; it is an assault on an existing right. The Turkish opposition is not demanding a new right but defending one it already holds: to contest elections without a judge deciding who leads it. And when a government cannot defeat its opponent at the ballot box and pursues him through the courts, it is not managing a political disagreement; it is confiscating the people’s right to choose.
In Syria we have not yet reached the stage where parties are confiscated, because we are forbidden to found them in the first place. The distance between having your party barred from meeting and having it barred from existing is the distance between a government that fears competition and one that does not acknowledge it at all. But the lesson is the same in both cases: legitimacy is not manufactured from above. It is not created by a judge’s ruling, as Erdoğan is attempting, and it is not conferred by a handshake in a foreign capital or an official reception that launders a ruler brought in by force of fact. Whoever confiscates it admits he does not possess it, and whoever waits for it from abroad admits that at home it was never granted.