Özgür Özel signed away his membership of the party Atatürk founded, then signed the papers that created a rival to it. Ninety other members of parliament went with him. The founding declaration for Yeni Parti, the New Party, reached the Interior Ministry around midday on Friday, carried in by two of his group vice chairs, Gül Çiftçi and Murat Emir.

That delivery is the whole event. Under Article 8 of Turkish party law, a party acquires legal personality the moment its founding declaration and supporting documents reach the ministry, which issues a receipt in return. No approval, no waiting period. The law sets the floor at 30 founders. Yeni Parti filed with 91, all of them sitting lawmakers. Turkish outlets read the timing as deliberate: 24 July is the 103rd anniversary of the Treaty of Lausanne.

Özel posted the receipt. It is a plain sheet from the Interior Ministry's general secretariat, numbered 125987 and signed by the general secretary Harun Ersin Polat, recording that the founders of a political party "under the name Yeni Parti" had submitted their founding declaration and annexes under Law 2820, dated 24.07.2026. That single page is what makes the party real. It also settles the spelling: the branding renders it YENİ PARTİ in capitals, but the name on the state's paperwork is Yeni Parti.

Key developments

Özel released video of himself signing. "May it be good for the country, the nation, our party, all of us," he said, using the standard Turkish formula for a beginning.

What the numbers do to parliament

The CHP, founded in 1923 and the oldest party in the country, has been Türkiye's main opposition without a break since 2002. It stopped being the largest opposition bloc sometime around noon on Friday.

The 44 or so lawmakers left behind are not a uniform group. Sözcü, which has not said how it arrived at the figure, puts around 20 of them as members who did not want to leave the party rather than members who back Kılıçdaroğlu. If that reading holds, the CHP's loyalist core is smaller than its seat count.

One step is still outstanding before the chamber actually looks like that. Founding a party and holding a parliamentary group are separate things: under Article 95 of the constitution, Article 18 of parliament's rules of procedure and Article 22 of the party law, a group needs 20 lawmakers who belong to the same party, and independents cannot combine to form one however many of them there are. The 91 clear that threshold comfortably, but they have to formally join Yeni Parti first.

The scale of the exodus also settles an argument. Kılıçdaroğlu's camp had argued the defections would stay under 50, according to Sözcü. They ended at 91.

Who gets to keep Atatürk

Özel spent the rest of Friday making a claim that has nothing to do with seat counts. His X account, which has 3.8 million followers, is where it shows clearest. The line naming him chairman of the Republican People's Party is gone from the profile, and nothing has replaced it: the bio is now empty. What he posted alongside the receipt was a claim on ownership. "It is our nation that founded Yeni Parti," it reads, followed by a list of who the party belongs to, the worker, the pensioner, the civil servant, the shopkeeper, the farmer, women, young people, Türkiye. By Friday afternoon it had about 83,000 likes and 2 million views.

The banner across the top of that account is the most revealing thing he published all day.

On the left of it, in sepia, Atatürk walks through a wheat field in a flat cap and a countryman's coat. Across the middle, in white on a red bar, sits one of his most quoted lines: Köylü milletin efendisidir, the villager is the master of the nation. On the right, Özel himself rides an orange tractor at the head of a convoy of them, Turkish flags on the mudguards, villagers riding along. The registration plate starts with 66, the code for Yozgat.

Atatürk founded the CHP in 1923, and Kemalist iconography has been the party's inheritance ever since. Kılıçdaroğlu now holds the party, the headquarters, the name, and the six-arrow emblem, which stays with the CHP. Özel has taken the one thing that was never anyone's property. Atatürk is not a trademark.

That is the argument the banner makes without saying it. The question of which faction is the real continuation of the party Atatürk built will not be decided by the Court of Cassation, and both sides know it.

The fight over the money

The most concrete dispute around the split is financial, and the argument for giving Özel's side money came from an unlikely quarter. Devlet Bahçeli, whose MHP governs alongside the AKP in the People's Alliance, raised it on Thursday, the day before the filing.

Bahçeli argued that if a party splits off while the buildings and official cars stay behind, the cash should move. "Since the CHP's assets such as buildings and official vehicles remain with the existing party," he said, "transferring a share of the 1 billion 815 million lira paid to the CHP from the treasury in 2026, in proportion to the number of deputies leaving for the new party, is the ethical thing."

The CHP spokesman Müslim Sarı rejected the framing and questioned the motive, asking why Bahçeli had not raised the same ethical point when the İYİ Party was founded out of the MHP in 2017, and whether he was looking to bail out a financially squeezed rival.

Murat Emir, on Özel's side, said the current law does not allow it regardless.

For now the CHP keeps both the treasury payment and the property. Changing that would take a change in the law, which is to say it would take the governing bloc deciding Bahçeli's suggestion is worth acting on.

Outside Ankara

The resignations ran well past parliament, though the numbers here come almost entirely from Sözcü and from local officials announcing their own departures, so treat them as reported rather than tallied.

In Kars, the mayor of Susuz district, Oğuz Yantemur, resigned alongside six municipal council members. "The absolute nullity ruling and the process that developed afterwards have unfortunately made clear that internal party democracy is not working," he said, framing the decision around the authority of the party congress.

A CHP official in Diyarbakır, Recep Yavuz, said 685 members there had quit. In Eskişehir's Odunpazarı municipality, the mayor said 22 of the 23 CHP council members were leaving. Neither figure has been confirmed by the party centrally.

What has not been decided

The ruling that set this off is still under appeal. In May an Ankara appeals court annulled the November 2023 CHP congress that elected Özel, citing irregularities, and reinstated Kılıçdaroğlu. Özel took it to the Court of Cassation, which has pushed a final decision past 1 September.

That appeal now has a strange quality to it. Özel is asking the courts to confirm he was the lawful leader of a party he resigned from on Friday morning. His separate application for a civil court to appoint a caretaker committee under former CHP leader Murat Karayalçın is still pending too.

Both camps have kept their accounts of what happened intact. Özel and his allies call the annulment and the wider prosecutions a political operation run through the courts. The government says the judiciary decided independently and that no one directed the outcome. Neither claim has been tested by a final ruling, and the split has now outrun the case that caused it.

One question went unanswered in Ankara all day. Ekrem İmamoğlu, the İstanbul mayor the CHP picked as its presidential candidate in 2025, has been jailed since March of that year and is on trial on corruption charges he denies. The candidacy belongs to the CHP. Most of the party's lawmakers no longer do. Which of the two parties he stands for in 2028, if he stands at all, is now an open question, and neither side was reported making a claim on him the day the split became final.