Devlet Bahçeli

Devlet Bahçeli (born 1 January 1948) is a Turkish politician and economist who is the current chairman of the far-right, ultranationalist Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). Bahçeli has been described as a kingmaker in Turkish politics. He was elected chairman of the MHP in the first congress held after the death of Alparslan Türkeş in 1997 and has led the party ever since. ^{1 2}

Bahçeli entered the Grand National Assembly for the first time in the 1999 general election as a deputy from Osmaniye, taking part as deputy prime minister in the DSP-MHP-ANAP coalition between 1999 and 2002. Since 2018 his party has supported President Erdoğan's governments in parliament within the People's Alliance. ¹

Devlet Bahçeli was born on 1 January 1948 in the rural district of Bahçe in the province of Osmaniye. According to his own account, he belonged to a well-established Turkmen family known as "Fettahoğulları", and is one of the four children of his family, with two siblings from his father's first marriage. His father, Salih Bahçeli, was one of the well-known farmers and merchants of Osmaniye, and his mother's name was Samiye. ^{1 2}

He completed his primary education in his hometown of Osmaniye, attended secondary school with his elder brother Servet in Adana, and lived with relatives in Istanbul for his high school education. He was accepted into Gazi University in 1967 and graduated from its Foreign Trade Department in 1971; among his classmates was his future political rival Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu. ¹

Bahçeli worked as an assistant in the department of economics at Gazi University and affiliated high schools in 1972, was one of the founders of several professional associations of academics, received his doctorate in economics from Gazi University's Institute of Social Sciences, and continued lecturing in economic policy at the same university until 1987. ¹

In his youth, Bahçeli attended Alparslan Türkeş's seminars. While he was still a student at Gazi University in 1967, he worked as the founder and manager of the Grey Wolves. He served as the general secretary of the Turkish National Student Union between 1970 and 1971. ¹

After the 1980 coup, Bahçeli defended executives and members of the MHP and other nationalist organisations who were imprisoned. He resigned from his teaching position in 1987, when Türkeş requested his involvement in party politics, and was elected general secretary of the Nationalist Task Party (MÇP) in its 1987 congress, later serving in several positions in the upper echelons of the MÇP and the MHP. ¹

After the death of Alparslan Türkeş in 1997, Bahçeli won a second extraordinary congress against Türkeş's son Tuğrul Türkeş and was elected the new chairman of the MHP. With a new leader, the MHP increased its vote share from 8.18% to 17.98% in the 1999 election, its highest vote rate in its history, and became the second largest party. ^{1 2}

Bahçeli served as deputy prime minister in Bülent Ecevit's coalition government. He announced on 7 July 2002 his withdrawal of support for the government, calling for new elections to be held on 3 November. However, the MHP was expelled from parliament for not passing the 10% electoral threshold in the 2002 election, polling 8%. Bahçeli resigned his chairmanship, announcing "I am the only one responsible for the failure", but was re-elected in the party's 2003 congress. ¹

He and his party re-entered parliament in the 2007 general election and he was repeatedly re-elected chairman. Following the MHP's poor performance in the November 2015 general election, an intra-party crisis erupted: hundreds of delegates demanded an extraordinary congress, Bahçeli refused, and prominent names such as Meral Akşener were expelled and founded the Good Party under her leadership on 25 October 2017. ¹

Bahçeli was initially a fierce critic of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan throughout the 2000s and 2010s, until his newfound closeness to Erdoğan after the intra-party crisis. He supported Erdoğan in the 2017 constitutional amendment referendum, and in 2018 an electoral alliance between the AKP and the MHP called the People's Alliance was established. ¹

Bahçeli stated that he was not running for president and that the MHP would support Erdoğan's candidacy. Erdoğan was re-elected president, and the MHP received 11% of the votes and 49 deputies. The MHP has since given confidence and supply to AKP governments, maintained the alliance in the 2019 local elections, and Bahçeli was re-elected chairman in the congresses of 2018 and 2021. ¹

This section should be read as a presentation of differing positions reported in the sources, not as the museum's verdict on them.

His reported positions: Bahçeli is critical of the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), which he demands be banned; when the Constitutional Court turned down an indictment for banning the party, he demanded the closure of the court itself. In October 2024, Bahçeli suggested offering PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan parole if he renounced violence and disbanded his group — a proposal that shocked many, since in 2007 he had thrown a noose at a rally to demand Öcalan's execution. ¹

Criticism reported: The article reports accusations that he incited violence against journalists after assaults in Ankara in January 2021; Bahçeli rejected the claim that he incited the attacks, calling it a cheap provocation. Charges were also filed against him in 2023 by a columnist after an attempted raid on his home. The article also reports his close ties to mafia leader Alaattin Çakıcı, whom he visited in prison and for whom he demanded a general amnesty, a demand Erdoğan denied, and controversial statements concerning Armenians, Greece and minorities, including his 2015 remarks about Koreans and Chinese and his denial that there were genocides in Turkey's history. ¹

Bahçeli's gaffes during speeches and malapropisms are well known in Turkish politics; one speech during the 2009 local elections campaign, coinciding with the 40th anniversary of the MHP, became a meme. ¹

The article credits Bahçeli with a number of political books and manifestos, including works on Turkey's agenda, on democracy, freedom and the constitution, and on power unity for the survival of the nation and the state. ¹

Bahçeli is unmarried, as the article states. He supported the football team Beşiktaş until 2023, but cancelled his membership in the club after fans demanded the government's resignation over its response to the February 2023 earthquake. On 6 February 2025 he was hospitalised for a planned heart valve replacement surgery. ¹

Bahçeli has led the MHP for more than a quarter of a century and has been described as a "kingmaker": since 2018 his party's parliamentary support has been a pillar of the survival of AKP governments, after he spent years as one of Erdoğan's fiercest critics. ¹

• The defined sources cited above, recorded in data/source/.
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