5 politicians whose popularity Erdogan is worried about in Türkiye.

5 politicians whose popularity Erdogan is worried about in Türkiye.

These days, the verbal tension between Erdogan and the opposition leader has reached its peak in Turkey.

Özgür Özel, the leader of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), is speaking about Erdogan in a harsher tone than ever before.

In his latest speech, he declared, “Erdoğan is now a lonely and weak person and is not in a good mental state. He has abandoned the law and is practically working like the head of the coup plotters. Erdogan’s votes have decreased to 29 percent. He is in a state of weakness, isolation, and rejection.”

Özel, who is extremely angry and inflamed by the arrest of hundreds of politicians and active cadres of his party, is the same energetic and young politician who took over the party leadership after Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu’s heavy defeat in the 2023 presidential election and was able to inflict a heavy defeat on Erdogan in the 2024 municipal elections.

But Özel’s happy times were short-lived. Soon, most of his key team members, including Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, were arrested and imprisoned, and Özel described the move as Erdogan’s electoral revenge.

Now, a kind of political deadlock has practically emerged in Turkey, and the conditions for the upcoming elections are unclear. Despite the widespread economic crisis, the situation for the opposition to Erdogan is also uncertain, and the list of potential rivals to unseat the AK Party leader is limited.