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Turkey's main opposition party has ousted its longtime leader Kemal Kılıçdaroglu after his landslide defeat against Recep Tayyip Erdogan in presidential elections earlier this year.
Members of the Republican People's Party (CHP) voted early Sunday to replace Kılıçdaroglu with Ozgür Ozel, a veteran lawmaker who vowed to shake up the organization's strategy ahead of local elections scheduled for March next year.
The decision marks the most significant change in power in Turkey's opposition since Kılıçdaroglu became head of the CHP in 2010.
"I have proposed a bold and determined policy against the shameful and passive policy pursued by our party for a while ," Ozel said as the CHP party congress began on Saturday in Ankara.
The first round of voting for party chairman was inconclusive, with neither Kılıçdaroglu nor Ozel, the frontrunners in the race, garnering the majority of votes among the more than 1,300 party delegates who took part in the vote. Ozel won an 812-vote majority in the second round, which stretched into the early hours of Sunday.
The presidential vote will set the stage for how the CHP, the secular party of Turkey's founding father Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, will prepare for next year's municipal elections. There comes a time when many analysts warn that Erdogan is sliding towards autocracy.
Kılıçdaroglu led a six-party coalition in the May 2023 presidential vote, seen as the opposition's best shot in years to oust Erdogan after two decades in power.
His defeat, after an unprecedented runoff, caused widespread dismay among opposition members, some of whom have questioned whether the mild-mannered 74-year-old was the right candidate to challenge Erdogan, who is known for his rhetoric of fiery
Some party insiders have also said that Kılıçdaroglu made too many concessions to smaller political groups that joined the six-party opposition alliance, while others have complained that he delegated party management to a small group of senior officials and consultants in rather than seeking advice from a wider group of stakeholders.
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