Özgür Özel's decision to quit the CHP and build a new party invites an obvious question: has anyone done this before, and did it work? Across a century of Turkish politics, leaving the Republican People's Party has produced two of the most consequential parties in the country's history and a longer list of ventures that went nowhere. Özel's move fits neither pattern cleanly.
The two that worked
The template for success is old. In 1946 four figures broke from the CHP, Celâl Bayar, Adnan Menderes, Fuad Köprülü and Refik Koraltan, and founded the Democrat Party. Four years later, in the 14 May 1950 election, the first free vote in Türkiye in more than two decades, they won what Encyclopedia Britannica calls a landslide. Bayar became president, Menderes prime minister, and the party governed for a decade. The result opened the competitive multiparty politics whose first years the historian Kemal Karpat later chronicled. A breakaway had done more than survive. It had taken the country.
The second success came by a stranger route. After the 1980 coup banned every party, the CHP included, the social-democratic vote fractured, and one fragment became the Democratic Left Party (DSP), founded in 1985. By the 1995 election the DSP outpolled the re-founded CHP, taking 14.7 percent to the CHP's bare clearance of the 10 percent threshold, as the political scientist Dario Moreno recorded, and Bülent Ecevit led it to the top of the 1999 poll and into the prime ministry. The DSP's lesson is narrower than the Democrat Party's: a breakaway could inherit the tradition when the parent was weak, and even lead it, though it did so as one heir among several.
The ones that faded
Most attempts did neither. The first breakaway set the tone. In 1924 a group of Atatürk's former comrades, led by Kâzım Karabekir, left to form the Progressive Republican Party; it was shut down the following year. The ambitious departure that comes to little has recurred ever since.
The most recent example is the sharpest warning. Muharrem İnce, the CHP's 2018 presidential candidate, resigned from the party and founded Memleket Partisi in 2021. His 2023 presidential campaign collapsed, he withdrew days before the vote, and by early 2025 the CHP was discussing his return. He had left as a prominent name and taken almost none of the party's voters with him. A Bilkent University study of party splits in the Turkish system, by the political scientist Ö. Demirkol, documents how routine such splits have been since the late 1940s, counting only those that won seats in parliament. The İnce case, a departure that faded, is the more familiar shape.
Who votes CHP, and would they follow
Whether any of this bears on Özel's project turns on a prior question: who votes for the CHP, and would they follow a leader out the door? The party's electorate is among the best-mapped in Türkiye. Surveys, including KONDA's, describe a base that is secular, more urban and better educated than the national average, concentrated along the western and southern coasts, in the Aegean around İzmir, in Thrace, and in the big cities, with Alevi communities voting heavily for the party while conservative central Anatolia and the Kurdish southeast lean elsewhere.
That base has been shifting. In the March 2024 local elections the CHP won the national popular vote for the first time in decades, reaching beyond its coastal heartland, a result the French institute IFRI read as the party establishing itself as the country's leading force. The CHP of the İmamoğlu years is a wider coalition than the one that kept losing through the 2010s.
The portability of that coalition is where the precedents cut against a splinter. İnce is the clearest test: he showed that CHP loyalty attaches to the party and its tradition rather than to a departing figure, and his voters stayed where they were. If the same holds for Özel, a party built around him would begin with a fraction of the coalition, not the whole of it.
Why Özel is different
Except that Özel is not İnce, and not Bayar and Menderes either. He did not lose an election and leave in frustration, and he is not a faction breaking away from a governing party. He is the party's elected chairman, removed by a court rather than by the members, proposing to take with him a reported 90 of the CHP's deputies, most of its provincial organizations, and, his allies argue, its voters. If that holds, the new party would be less a splinter from the CHP than the CHP itself moving into a new vehicle, with the court-reinstated leadership left holding the older name.
That is the case the history cannot settle. The Democrat Party built something new; the DSP inherited a tradition its parent had dropped; İnce left and took almost nothing. Özel is proposing to carry the party itself across, organization, deputies and all. Whether the voters accept the new vehicle as the real CHP is the one thing a hundred years of breakaways does not answer, because the question has not come up in quite this form before.
The government's allies read the split as the opposition breaking itself apart to President Erdoğan's benefit. Özel's camp reads it as the only way to keep an elected movement alive against a judiciary it calls politicized. Both are positions, not verdicts. The record offers a range rather than a forecast: leaving the CHP has ended in the country's highest office and in near-total obscurity, and the difference has usually come down to one thing, whether the voters followed.