Bahçeli: Trustee for CHP 'not right or possible'

ANKARA

Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) leader Devlet Bahçeli said on April 17 that appointing a trustee to the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) is “neither right nor possible."

“Those who speculate and create hype that a trustee will be appointed to the CHP are devils who have nestled deep inside us,” Bahçeli said in a written statement posted on social media.

His remarks came as reports circulated about a possible trustee appointment in connection with an ongoing legal case over alleged irregularities during the CHP’s 2023 party convention.

The party held an extraordinary congress on April 6, in what its officials described as a move to counter speculation about a potential intervention.

“A trustee to the CHP is neither right nor possible,” Bahçeli said. “Because the CHP has already turned into a living organism that eats itself up with de facto tutelage and trustee rule.”

Bahçeli also lashed out at the CHP-backed demonstrations against the detention of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu. He was arrested last month in a sweeping corruption probe targeting top municipal officials.

“The CHP chairman [Özgür Özel] and his opposing decency and virtue, self-interested comrades who align themselves with him are disregarding the possibilities and will of democracy,” Bahçeli said.

“After the instigation of university youth, agitating groups of high school students and putting them on a protest watch in front of schools, hoping for help from the manipulation of a routine and customary practice within the national education system is a crime, irresponsibility, and moreover, a lack of conscience and reason,” he said.

He accused the party of manipulating student activism and engaging in reckless provocation.

“The CHP's street rehearsals and the vile provocations of illegal left and marginal groups are based on the principle of grinding our children like a millstone and destroying their future,” he said.

“The unjust and unlawful protest demonstrations, which are allegedly carried out under the pretense of seeking democratic rights, will end up in a life lost and trapped in regrets."

The CHP's extraordinary convention earlier this month reaffirmed Özel’s leadership, with 1,171 delegates backing him as the sole candidate.