President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will meet with main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) leader Özgür Özel on June 11, Özel himself and the Presidency’s Directorate of Communications confirmed Thursday.
This will be the second meeting of two men since the March 31 municipal elections. They held talks at the Presidential Complex in a landmark meeting in early May, apparently agreed upon during their brief, informal meeting in April during a national holiday event.
Özel told reporters that the meeting would be held at 4 p.m. local time and the same delegation that accompanied him to the Presidential Complex at the first meeting will be present at the second one, including lawmaker Namık Tan, a former ambassador to the United States.
The meeting of Erdoğan and Özel was unprecedented as the president never held such a formal meeting with Özel’s predecessor Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu. Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AK Party) and the CHP competed in a string of local and general elections since the early 2000s but the opposition has been a chronic loser, except winning a few key cities in the 2019 municipal elections. The latest local elections, however, marked a comeback for the CHP, which increased the number of local administrations it retained.
Özel said they would discuss "all issues."
"It is important to be able to talk to each other. If politicians do not shake hands, it will play into the hands of circles seeking domination (of Türkiye). Politicians meet, discuss and finally compete. In the end, it is Türkiye that wins," Özel said.
Erdoğan has hailed their earlier meeting as the sign of a "softening climate" in Turkish politics where the AK Party and the CHP fiercely campaigned against each other in the past two decades, shunning any dialogue. The president, however, underlined that they had "red lines" that the CHP should not cross.
"We are not talking about a softening approach. Nobody should expect the opposition to soften it while the citizens are suffering," Özel told reporters. He said it should rather be a "normalization" process.
The president on Wednesday received Meral Akşener, former chair of the Good Party (IP) who joined a CHP-led opposition bloc against him in the 2023 presidential elections. The president is a fervent supporter of what he called "a festival of democracy" and accepted his party’s shortcomings after the AK Party lost several municipalities to the CHP in the March vote. He also seeks a consensus among parties for a new constitution.
Parliament Speaker Numan Kurtulmuş is currently engaged in a series of talks with the opposition parties to hear their views about the constitution Erdoğan championed, to replace the one drafted by the military junta in 1980.