Filling the Europeanisation Void? The Limits of the CHP’s EU Agenda in Turkish Foreign Policy

This article offers a critical analysis of the Europeanisation agenda of Turkey’s Republican People’s Party (CHP) from 2017 to 2025, with a particular focus on foreign policy. The scholarship on Europeanisation and de-Europeanisation in Turkey has overwhelmingly focused on the Justice and Development Party (AKP), analysing its early EU-driven reforms and subsequent departure from EU norms. This AKP-centric approach has largely neglected the role of opposition parties, thereby overlooking how Europeanisation may persist, transform, or fragment under conditions of democratic erosion and stalled accession. Addressing this gap, the article analyses the extent to which the CHP has aligned its foreign policy discourse and policy proposals with EU values, norms and objectives including multilateralism, rule-based international order, diplomacy, respect for international law, and good neighbourly relationships. By distinguishing the core themes of EU foreign policy from those characterising Turkey’s increasingly unilateral and security-driven approach under the AKP, the article argues that the CHP advances a selective and constrained form of re-Europeanisation. While the CHP offers a clear normative critique of de-Europeanisation and articulates an EU-compatible foreign policy vision, this agenda remains partial in scope, instrumental in its discourse, and insufficiently institutionalised. Consequently, the Europeanisation void created by fifteen years of AKP-led de-Europeanisation is only partially addressed, revealing the structural and political limits of opposition-driven Europeanisation in contemporary Turkey.