Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan received Turkey’s opposition leader Özgür Özel in Ankara on Thursday for his first meeting since Özel was elected the new secretary general of the Republican People’s Party (CHP) last November, ending Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu’s 13 years as leader of the opposition party.
The meeting, which took place in a cordial atmosphere, was held behind closed doors at the headquarters of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in the Turkish capital amid great expectation, with numerous Turkish media covering the event. Prior to today’s meeting, however, Erdoğan and Özel had already had the opportunity to meet and talk briefly in person on the occasion of events marking Children and National Sovereignty Day, a national holiday celebrated every 23 April.
After the meeting, which lasted approximately 1 hour and 35 minutes, neither political leader made any official statements about the meeting. Upon leaving the AKP party headquarters, Özel was immediately surrounded by dozens of journalists who tried in vain to get any kind of statement from the opposition leader, who went directly to his heavily escorted official vehicle.
In any case, today’s meeting marks the first formal meeting between Erdoğan and Turkey’s opposition leader in eight years, and has been seen by many analysts as a gesture of détente between the two main political formations in the Eurasian country, especially after the municipal elections held on 31 March across Turkey, in which the AKP suffered a historic defeat and the CHP won its biggest victory in 40 years.
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Pablo Gómez is a specialist in Turkey and has been editor-in-chief of Hispanatolia since 2011. He has been analysing current affairs and geopolitics in Turkey and the surrounding region since 2006.
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