A Turkish court just removed the leader of the country's strongest opposition party - the same party that led the biggest street protests in a decade against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
The Istanbul stock market took it as a major blow, with the main BIST 100 index falling more than 6% on Thursday.
An Ankara appeals court annulled the 2023 leadership vote that made Ozgur Ozel chairman of the Republican People's Party, or CHP, which is Turkey's oldest political party. The ruling named the party's former long-time leader, 77-year-old Kemal Kilicdaroglu, as interim chairman.
Prosecutors had argued Ozel locked up the November 2023 chairmanship by leaning on delegates with offers of jobs and other favors. An earlier vote-buying case was thrown out in October, but prosecutors appealed and won the second round.
The CHP urged its senior members to gather at the party's Ankara headquarters and called the ruling a "political coup," and the party can still appeal the decision.
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CHP isn't a small player. The party crushed Erdogan's AKP in Turkey's 2024 local elections and has been climbing in national polls ever since.
Under Ozel, the CHP became the public face of the biggest street demonstrations Turkey has seen in 10 years, with the protests kicking off in March 2025 after Istanbul mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, the party's likely presidential candidate, was arrested. Imamoglu is now on trial for espionage and faces a parallel graft case where prosecutors are asking for a 2,430-year sentence.
Kilicdaroglu is a softer rival for Erdogan, having led the CHP through a string of electoral defeats and never seriously denting the AKP's hold on power. Replacing Ozel with Kilicdaroglu effectively weakens the only force in Turkey beating Erdogan at the ballot box.
The 6% drop in the BIST 100 is the cleanest signal of what markets think. Investors usually like predictable politics, and a weaker opposition normally means a stronger ruling party, which in Turkey's case often translates into more direct influence over the central bank, the courts and the currency.
The Turkish lira and Turkish dollar bonds are the next instruments to watch, as both have a long history of moving on political headlines, and this one is about as political as it gets.
CHP's appeal is the next near-term event for traders to follow. Beyond that, watch whether the street protests that followed Imamoglu's arrest re-ignite around Ozel's removal, because the political risk premium baked into Turkish assets just went up.
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