2023-11-05 07:52:40
Turkey’s main opposition party replaced its leader, Kemal Kiliçdaroglu, on Sunday with Ozgur Ozel, a former pharmacist who is still inexperienced. His mission will be to straighten out the party after the bitter electoral defeat against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
The Republican People’s Party (CHP, social-democrat) has been divided since Kemal Kiliçdaroglu lost a bitterly contested second round against the Turkish president in May.
At the party’s annual congress, delegates voted to replace Kemal Kiliçdaroglu with the relatively unknown Ozgur Ozel after squandering what many see as the opposition’s best chance to end two decades of Islamist rule. conservative of Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
“Write a new story”
Ozgur Ozel spent much of his career working as a pharmacist in the tourist city of Izmir (west), a stronghold of opposition to Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He later became president of the Pharmacists Association of Turkey and was elected to Parliament in 2011.
The 49-year-old speaker won the final vote by 812 votes to 536, after presenting himself as the candidate of “change”. But the vote was much more focused on the personalities of the two men than on particular policies.
Kemal Kiliçdaroglu compared attempts to oust him to a “stab in the back”, Ozgur Ozel for his part emphasizing his desire to “write a new history and reshape Turkish politics”.
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