An Ankara appeals court on 21 May annulled the Republican People's Party (CHP) 38th Ordinary Congress of November 2023, ruling that the leadership election that brought Özgür Özel to power was tainted by vote-buying and material inducements to delegates. The court provisionally reinstated former chairman Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu and his pre-2023 executive team.

The 36th Civil Chamber of the Ankara Regional Court of Justice issued the ruling under the doctrine of mutlak butlan, absolute nullity, a finding that voids an outcome from its inception rather than from the date of the judgment. The decision overturned a 24 October 2025 lower-court ruling that had dismissed the consolidated lawsuits.

A party dispute, decided in court

The case came from inside the party, brought by CHP delegates and senior figures rather than the government or outside actors. Delegate Hatip Karaaslan filed the first lawsuit on 14 February 2025. The next day, former Hatay metropolitan mayor Lütfü Savaş, a long-standing CHP figure, filed his own. More followed from Levent Çelik (18 February), Yılmaz Özkanat (3 March), and Kamile Bahar Önal (27 March). The cases were consolidated at the Ankara 42nd Civil Court of First Instance.

The plaintiffs argued that the November 2023 congress, at which Özel defeated Kılıçdaroğlu after roughly 13 years of the latter's leadership, was procedurally compromised and that delegate votes had been secured through improper means.

What the court found

According to the appeals court's reasoned decision, which Anadolu Ajansı reported, evidence presented during proceedings indicated that certain delegates received material benefits in exchange for votes favoring specific candidates. The court cited:

The court concluded that these inducements had compromised the free will of delegates enough to render the congress outcome null from the outset. The findings drew on witness testimony, statements from the complainants, primarily Savaş and other plaintiffs, and material connected to parallel criminal investigations in which prosecutors have filed an indictment against 12 individuals, including Istanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, on charges related to alleged vote manipulation.

The evidentiary record made public so far rests principally on testimonial and circumstantial elements. No independent forensic documentation, such as verified bank transfers or recordings of transactions tied specifically to the national congress vote, has appeared in public reporting. The appeals court nonetheless deemed the assembled evidence sufficient to establish outcome-influencing irregularities.

Why the appeals court reversed

That judgment of sufficiency is the crux of the reversal, because the same lawsuits had already been rejected once. The Ankara 42nd Civil Court of First Instance dismissed the consolidated case in October 2025, not finding the grounds strong enough to void the congress. Weighing the witness testimony, the complainants' accounts and material from the parallel criminal file, the appeals court reached the opposite view: that the inducements it identified had compromised the delegates' free will so fundamentally that the result was void from the outset. That is the line between an ordinary irregularity, which a court can note without overturning an outcome, and absolute nullity, which erases it, and it is why the remedy here was to restore the previous leadership rather than order a fresh vote. The two courts, in short, split on whether the evidence cleared that higher bar. Whether the Court of Cassation agrees is the question now before it.

Timeline

Reactions within the party

Kılıçdaroğlu welcomed the ruling. In a post on X, he framed it as an opportunity for unity, writing that the CHP is "the sovereignty deed of our nation" and "not a battleground for personal ambition." Speaking briefly to TGRT Haber, he said, "May it be auspicious for Türkiye and the CHP."

Savaş and the other complainants, all CHP members, called the ruling a vindication of their claim that the 2023 congress was corrupted by material inducements.

The Özel leadership rejected the ruling outright, calling it judicial overreach and announcing appeals and public protests. Özel and his team maintain that the congress reflected the legitimate will of the delegates.

The divide predates the lawsuits. Critics of the 2023 leadership change argue the transition was engineered through improper means, while Özel's supporters point to the party's electoral record under his chairmanship, including the March 2024 local elections, when the CHP became the leading party in Türkiye by vote share for the first time in decades, as evidence of a legitimate mandate.

What happens next

Under the ruling, the CHP leadership provisionally reverts to its pre-November 2023 configuration. If Kılıçdaroğlu declines the chairmanship, authorities may appoint a temporary trustee to run the party until a new congress is held. The decision is subject to further appeal, and the Özel camp has said it will exhaust every legal remedy.

Markets reacted sharply. Trading on the BIST 100 was halted temporarily after the benchmark fell more than six percent on the day of the ruling. Further legal proceedings, civil and criminal, are expected in the weeks ahead.

International precedents

The ruling is unusual in scope, but disputes over party-leadership elections and intra-party vote-buying are not unknown in Western democracies.

Italy, More Europe, 2019. The clearest European parallel involves the small Italian liberal party More Europe (Più Europa). At its first congress in Milan in January 2019, Benedetto Della Vedova was elected secretary with 55.7 percent of the vote, defeating former MEP Marco Cappato and Alessandro Fusacchia. Cappato and his supporters alleged that delegates aligned with the list of veteran politician Bruno Tabacci included paid supporters brought in to vote. The dispute was settled politically, not in court, but the allegations fed a long-running schism.

United States, Bridgeport, Connecticut, 2023. In the 2023 Democratic mayoral primary in Bridgeport, incumbent Joseph Ganim defeated challenger John Gomes by roughly 251 votes, his margin coming mostly from absentee ballots. Superior Court Judge William Clark later overturned the result and ordered a new election, citing evidence of ballot harvesting; video showed two Ganim supporters making multiple unauthorized drops of absentee ballots. Criminal charges followed in February 2025. It concerned a public primary, not an internal congress, but it remains one of the few recent US cases to void an intra-party vote on fraud grounds.

United Kingdom, Labour leadership disputes. In Britain, leadership-contest disputes have repeatedly reached the courts, usually over procedural rules rather than vote-buying. In 2016, two cases arising from the challenge to Jeremy Corbyn's leadership reached the High Court. In November 2023, Labour abandoned a parliamentary candidate selection amid irregularity allegations, with criminal charges later filed against four individuals.

Germany, Hamburg CDU, 1991. After the 1991 Hamburg state election, CDU members complained of deficiencies in the candidate-nomination process. In May 1993 the Constitutional Court of Hamburg declared the election invalid and ordered a complete re-run, a fresh vote rather than the reinstatement of a previous leader.

The Turkish ruling stands out in two respects. The usual remedy in comparable Western cases has been a re-run rather than reinstating the prior leadership. And the evidentiary threshold in cases like Bridgeport involved videotaped conduct and verified ballot-handling violations, whereas the CHP case has rested mainly on testimonial and circumstantial evidence. Material inducements to delegates is, even so, a recognized form of intra-party corruption that has surfaced in other democracies.