Ankara Court Voids CHP Congress, Reinstates Kılıçdaroğlu

Turkish politics on May 22 ran on two parallel rails: the institutional shock of the previous evening's court ruling against the main opposition, and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's set-piece geopolitical pitch at the Istanbul Natural Resources Summit. Ankara's Regional Court of Appeals on 21 May declared the Republican People's Party's 38th Ordinary Congress of 4-5 November 2023 — the congress at which Özgür Özel defeated Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu for the CHP leadership — "absolutely null and void," invalidating all subsequent ordinary and extraordinary congresses and as a precautionary measure suspending Özel, the Central Executive Board, the Party Assembly and the High Disciplinary Board until the ruling becomes final. The decision restores the pre-congress leadership structure under Kılıçdaroğlu pending final judicial review and is open to appeal before the Court of Cassation within two weeks; an appeal has been announced. MHP leader Devlet Bahçeli — already a kingmaker in Erdoğan's "Terror-Free Türkiye" process — intervened the same evening on CNN Türk with anchor Hande Fırat, urging Kılıçdaroğlu to "undertake a historic responsibility," waive his position, and negotiate a joint formula with Özel before a fresh congress. Yetkin Report political analyst Murat Yetkin documented the backroom plan implicit in Bahçeli's call: Özel agrees to step aside, Kılıçdaroğlu pulls the complainants from the nullity suit, both back a mutually agreed third name as compromise candidate — a sequence that would simultaneously erase Ekrem İmamoğlu's presidential nomination announced by Özel's now-suspended administration. Özel, in a Genel Merkez statement, rejected outright what he called the "comfortable, eternal opposition seats" being offered.

Even as the CHP crisis dominated the political space, Erdoğan opened the second Istanbul Natural Resources Summit with a long pitch on Türkiye's reformed energy architecture. He said the country has proven itself a reliable energy-transit partner amid the Russia-Ukraine war and the Iran conflict, and committed to raising daily LNG regasification capacity to 200 million cubic metres and boosting Black Sea gas output from the Sakarya field to 20 million cubic metres per day in 2026. Energy Minister Alparslan Bayraktar fleshed out the architecture: maximising capacity on TANAP, TurkStream, the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline and the Iraq-Türkiye link, then extending the Iraq pipeline to Basra, building a Saudi Arabia-Jordan-Syria-Türkiye electricity interconnection, and expanding green-energy transmission from Azerbaijan to Europe. Bayraktar described an "age of uncertainty" demanding a new approach; the day's pitch was structured as Ankara's argument for being indispensable to European energy security in the wake of the Hormuz crisis.

A second, harder-edged decree landed on the institutional side. Erdoğan signed an order, published in the Official Gazette, revoking the operating licence of Istanbul Bilgi University — a private institution with an estimated 20,000 students — effective immediately, mid-academic year. The decree cited insufficient education standards and the placement of the founding foundation under trusteeship; the university itself had been seized by the state in September 2025 as part of a money-laundering and tax-fraud investigation into its parent, Can Holding. Aljazeera and Euronews carried the closure as a continued tightening on Türkiye's liberal private-education sector.

Türkiye's defence-diplomacy posture also produced two historic firsts. The EFES-2026 combined joint live-fire exercise near İzmir, which concluded its live-fire phase on May 21, drew over 10,000 personnel from 50 nations; Libya's rival eastern and western factions deployed 502 troops (331 from the east, 171 from the west) who trained together under a single Libyan flag for the first time, and Syria contributed roughly 50 personnel in the reconstituted Syrian army's first foreign exercise. Daily Sabah carried it as evidence that Türkiye now serves as Libya's and post-Assad Syria's primary military-integration partner. And on the Israel-Palestine track, Israel's COGAT ordered the World Food Programme to immediately suspend all fuel transfers and activities with the Turkish IHH humanitarian organisation, alleging links to Hamas and citing IHH's support of flotilla challenges to the Israeli blockade; the WFP warned the order would cut off assistance to about 166,000 people in Gaza.