. @eczozgurozel has bid farewell to the CHP and announced the creation of a new political party, together with the majority of its parliamentary group. This dramatic step follows the judicial removal of the @herkesicinCHP ’s elected leadership—another grave attack on democratic pluralism and on an opposition already targeted through the imprisonment of Ekrem İmamoğlu.
The European Democratic Party sends its warmest wishes to Özgür Özel, Ekrem İmamoğlu, the new party and, above all, the Turkish people. May this new beginning help Türkiye emerge from a dark period marked by Erdoğan’s relentless repression of freedoms—and by the complicity of timid and cowardly leaders who chose personal power over democracy.
History will remember where everyone stood.
TGC: Alican Uludağ’ın serbest bırakılmasını istiyoruz
Türkiye Gazeteciler Cemiyeti Yönetim Kurulu, DW Yargı Muhabiri Alican Uludağ’ın gözaltına alınmasıyla ilgili bir açıklama yaptı. Açıklamada şu görüşler yer aldı:
“Türkiye Gazeteciler Cemiyeti’nin 2026 Basın Özgürlüğü Ödülü’ne Kişi Dalı’nda değer görülen gazetecilerden olan Alican Uludağ’ın ikinci kez gözaltına alınmasını kaygıyla karşılıyoruz.
Basın ve düşünceyi ifade özgürlüğü, yurttaşların doğru, tarafsız ve eksiksiz bilgiye ulaşma hakkının güvencesidir. Basın özgürlüğünün zayıflatıldığı bir ortamda toplumun gerçekleri öğrenmesi mümkün değildir.
Türkiye Cumhuriyeti demokratik bir toplumsa, kamuoyunu ilgilendiren tüm olaylar hakkında, halkı objektif ve gerçekleri yansıtacak biçimde aydınlatmanın basının varĺık nedeni olduğu bilinmelidir. Halkı olumsuz etkileyen, kamu yararını zedeleyen sorunlarla ilgili olarak iktidarı ve yöneticileri eleştirmek, uyarmak, bu varlık nedeninin olmazsa olmazıdır. Haber gerçekse, haber güncelse, yayınlanmasında kamu yararı varsa, haber yapılır, yayınlanır, sunulur ve yorumlanır. Gazetecilerin sürekli gözaltı ve soruşturma tehdidiyle karşı karşıya bırakılması halkın haber alma hakkını hedef almaktadır. Basın üzerinde caydırıcı bir etki yaratmaktadır. Gazetecilerin haksız yere gözaltına alınmasından, tutuklanmasından vazgeçilmelidir. Alican Uludağ’ın bir an önce özgür bırakılmasını talep ediyoruz. #Gazeteciliksuçdeğildir .”
ALİCAN ULUDAĞ 90 GÜN TUTUKLU KALMIŞTI
Cumhurbaşkanına hakaret iddiasıyla Silivri’de 90 gün tutuklu kalan kalan Alican Uludağ 21 Mayıs 2026’da tahliye edilmişti. Türkiye Gazeteciler Cemiyeti Yönetim Kurulu, 15 Mayıs 2026 Cuma günü Alican Uludağ’ı Silivri’de ziyaret etmişti. Ziyarete Türkiye Gazeteciler Cemiyeti (TGC) Başkan Vekili Doğan Şentürk, Genel Sekreter Sibel Güneş, Genel Sekreter Yardımcısı Uğur Güç ile Yönetim Kurulu üyeleri Göksel Göksu ve Zeynel Lüle katılmıştı.
@alicanuludag
this is for my european and american readers.
if you only read one thing about foreign politics today, let it be this.
because what just happened in turkey today reads like the climax of a political thriller, and you need to understand exactly what is breaking apart.
for decades, the chp has been the foundation of the turkish opposition. the historic party of the republic. the only real counterweight to recep tayyip erdoğan.
today, that party split in two.
özgür özel, the man who was democratically elected to lead the opposition last year, just walked out to the podium, resigned, and announced he is launching a brand new political party.
he is taking up to eighty lawmakers with him, instantly making his new faction the largest opposition bloc in parliament.
why would the leader of the opposition abandon his own historic party?
because erdoğan's system figured out how to hijack it from the inside.
earlier this year, a turkish court handed down a ruling that was almost unthinkable.
they annulled the chp's internal 2023 congress. they legally erased özel's democratic election as leader and forcefully reinstated the former chairman, kemal kılıçdaroğlu. a man erdoğan knows he can easily beat.
it was a breathtaking piece of judicial sabotage.
if you cannot defeat the opposition at the ballot box, you simply use a judge to rewrite who leads them.
but you cannot understand what happened today without looking at a prison cell.
ekrem imamoğlu, the mayor of istanbul, the man who beat erdoğan's machine twice in one year, is still sitting in pre trial detention in silivri. he has been there for over sixteen months without a conviction.
he is the true heart of this movement. the government locked him away because he was too popular, too dangerous, and too capable of winning a national election.
özel's move today is about protecting that exact legacy.
he realized that staying in a hijacked, court controlled chp meant playing a rigged game. the regime wanted them trapped in endless legal battles over party bylaws while the country burned.
so özel refused to play. he flipped the board.
the regime's retaliation was immediate.
today, just as this historic split was happening, authorities detained doruk bulut in a sudden corruption probe. he is the chp district chairman for silivri.
read that location again. silivri.
the exact district where the government is currently holding imamoğlu in a cell.
that is not a coincidence. that is a message. a raw, naked display of state power meant to terrify anyone thinking of joining the new movement.
western capitals need to wake up.
this is what modern authoritarianism looks like. it does not use tanks in the streets. it uses gavels, court orders, and targeted arrests to surgically dismantle the democratic process in broad daylight.
but what happened today is also something else.
it is proof that the opposition in turkey is refusing to die quietly. they are literally burning down their own historic house just so they can build a new one out of the regime's reach.
turkey's democratic fight just entered a completely new and dangerous era.
and the whole world needs to be watching.
Genel Başkanımız Sayın Özgür Özel:
“Kimse kimseye, ‘Niye hâlâ yeni partiye geçmedin’ demesin. ‘Ben yokum’ dediğini kulağınızla duymadığınız herkes, emin olun ki bizimle birliktedir.
Ne Ekrem İmamoğlu’nu geride bırakırız ne Mansur Yavaş’ı. Ne Zeydan Karalar kalır Adana’da ne Vahap Seçer Mersin’de.”
this post is for anyone who has ever voted for someone and watched the government find a way to make that vote not count. Ekrem imamoğlu's voters know exactly what that feels like.
enrique peñalosa just wrote something that should travel further than it has.
he was mayor of bogotá twice. he knows what the job actually requires, the trust it takes, the mandate that comes with a ballot.
and he says he cannot stop thinking about two men he has personally worked with to improve cities. ekrem imamoğlu. erion veliaj.
he met them together in 2024, at a summit for urbanists trying to make cities work better for the people living in them. he watched what they built.
metro lines and earthquake resilience in istanbul. rebuilt public spaces and tree-lined streets in tirana.
the unglamorous, difficult work of actually improving how millions of people live day to day.
both men are now in prison.
not for corruption anyone can point to cleanly. for cases peñalosa himself calls more political than criminal.
imamoğlu has been detained since march last year, charged with running a criminal organization, on trial now, and during this month's hearings he was, at points, barred from the courtroom and prevented from presenting his own defense.
a mayor, unable to defend himself against the case built to remove him.
veliaj has been held for 18 months. no conviction. ever.
and here's the detail that should stop you: albania's own constitutional court ruled that he could not be removed from office. so right now, erion veliaj is still, legally, the mayor of tirana.
his lawyers say prosecutors tried to restrict his access to nearly 60,000 pages of evidence against him.
limited his ability to speak privately with his own state-appointed counsel. and used his lobbying, his advocacy, his actual job as mayor, as justification to keep extending his detention.
think about that. the work of being an elected official was used as evidence against him.
peñalosa isn't alone in noticing.
76 mayors across the balkans signed a joint letter over exactly this.
and the council of europe's own venice commission, a body of constitutional law experts, published a report warning that this kind of detention doesn't just punish one man.
it can serve what the european convention on human rights calls an "ulterior purpose": suppressing political pluralism itself. removing a mayor, the commission wrote, doesn't only silence him. it strips his voters of the representative they chose.
that's the part everyone keeps missing.
this was never really about imamoğlu or veliaj as individuals.
it's about whether an election still means something once the votes are counted.
a two-time mayor of bogotá looked at istanbul and tirana and saw the same story wearing two different flags.
europe keeps issuing statements.
the cells stay full.
BUTLANCILAR BU İT SİZİN İTİNİZ Mİ DEĞİL Mİ?
Bu aşağıda fotosu ve hakkındaki haberi bulunan, kendini avukat olarak tanıtan butlancı, tasdikli üç kağıtçı dolandırıcı ağzı bozuk her türden ahlakın yoksunu, kelimenin gerçek anlamıyla pavyoncu dallama Ömer Ediz Yoraz aylardır insanlara burada, butlancılar namına olmadık hakaretler ediyor, tehditler savuruyor. Özgür Özel, CHP'li vekiller de dahil belden aşağı hakaretlerde dahi bulunuyor, ailelere dahi küfür ediyor.
Butlancılar bu köpek sizin köpeğiniz mi değil mi? Sizinse sahip çıkın değilse sizin namınıza konuşan ağzı bozuk, insanların ailesine dahi küfür eden hiçbir ahlaki sınırı olmayan, Kemal efendi ile fotoğrafı olan pislik bir dolandırıcıdan bir zahmet rahatsız olun, bu pisliğin bizimle alakası yoktur deyin, bir arınıverin. @barisyarkadas@gurseltekin34
*Bu özel durumlu arkadaş dün gece içip içip gece 3'te bana Instagram dm'den tehdit ve hakaret mesajı atmış. Ve ne yazık ki hani aile, soy sop edebiyatı da yapmış. Büyük bir talihsizlik oldu kendisi adına. Aslında beni fakülteden de tanır bu kartvizitli şair arkadaşımız, kim bilir kaç promilden sonra yaşandı bu talihsizlik. Kendisine henüz ulaşamadım. Ancak buradan da söyleyim: Ankara'nın tadı tuzu yok artık, bu şehirden bir an önce taşınmak lazım şair arkadaşım.
18.gün
Unutma unutturma, yanında ol!
Sevgili @idgoktaspolitik mizah yaptığı için kuyu tipi cezaevinde tutuklu.
Neşemizi tutuklayamazlar! #DenizGöktaşSerbestBırakılsın
Deniz Göktaş bir komedyen ve ifade özgürlüğünü kullandığı için hapiste, kaç gün olduğunu yazamam çünkü bunu düşünmek kalbimi kırıyor.
#DenizGöktaşSerbestBırakılsın
Özgür Özel'in bu uyarısını da dikkate alın. Bazı belediye başkanları, belediye meclis üyeleri yeni partiye geçmeyebilir.
'"Özgür Özel ve arkadaşlarıyla birlikte değilim' diye kulağınızla duymadığınız herkes emin olun bizimledir" dedi, Özgür Özel..