Özgür Özel announced on Tuesday that he is leaving the Republican People's Party (CHP) to form a new party, the sharpest turn yet in a leadership crisis that has gripped Türkiye's main opposition for two months. He declared the break in a speech to more than 80 lawmakers in parliament, calling it his farewell to the party, according to Reuters and TRT Haber. He did not file a formal resignation on the day; his allies say the founding petition for the new party will go to the Interior Ministry on 24 July.
Key developments (as of July 22)
- Defections. The İzmir deputy Murat Bakan was the first lawmaker to resign; Özel's camp says around 90 CHP members of parliament are expected to follow. Adana metropolitan mayor Zeydan Karalar is reported by CHP figures and Turkish journalists to be staying with the party.
- Grassroots reaction. Sözcü reported a surge of membership resignations through the state e-Devlet portal after the announcement, put at roughly 387,000 in the first hour, that briefly overwhelmed the system. The figure is the outlet's and has not been confirmed officially.
- In parliament. Kılıçdaroğlu made his first appearance at a parliamentary meeting since the court reinstated him, receiving parliament speaker Numan Kurtulmuş as part of a four-party consultation, alongside the MHP, DEM Party and Yeni Yol, on the government's planned "framework law" for the disarmament process.
"Today, we are on the brink of a sad farewell that has become inevitable and whose time has come," Özel told the group, framing the break as a beginning rather than a retreat. He said his team's departure was not a surrender to political pressure but the start of a new kind of opposition to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has run Türkiye for more than two decades.
He went further on the party's prospects, telling the group the new formation would become "by a clear margin" the main opposition in parliament. The defections began at once. The first to go, the İzmir deputy Murat Bakan, announced his departure on his own account, arguing that a fight to reclaim the CHP through the courts would only be lost and that the way to challenge the government was the new party. Özel's camp says dozens more will follow.
The move follows the ruling that set the crisis off. In May an Ankara appeals court annulled the CHP congress of November 2023 that had elected Özel, citing irregularities, and reinstated his predecessor, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu. Özel appealed to the Court of Cassation, which has left a final decision until after 1 September, so his removal is not yet settled. Rather than serve under the court-reinstated leadership or wait out the appeal, he is leaving to build his own party and take much of the CHP's parliamentary bloc with him.
Turkish outlets reported that the founding petition would be submitted to the Interior Ministry on 24 July, the anniversary of the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, and that around 90 of the CHP's members of parliament are expected to follow. The party has not been named. Separately, Özel has asked a civil court to appoint a caretaker committee, headed by the former CHP leader Murat Karayalçın, to run the party to a fresh congress in place of Kılıçdaroğlu, a bid not expected to produce a quick result.
The split lands on the party of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who founded the CHP more than a century ago, and it comes amid a nearly two-year run of legal cases against the opposition. Özel and his allies call the annulment and the wider crackdown a politically motivated "coup" carried out through the courts. The government rejects that, saying the judiciary acts independently. The dispute has rattled financial markets and drawn concern abroad about the rule of law in Türkiye.
At the center of the wider fight is Ekrem İmamoğlu, the CHP mayor of İstanbul and the party's presidential candidate, who has been jailed since last year and is on trial on corruption charges he denies. The next presidential election is due in 2028, though the president can call an early one, and analysts say the opposition's disarray could tempt the government to move sooner.
For now the CHP faces the prospect of losing most of its lawmakers to a party that does not yet have a name, while Kılıçdaroğlu holds its headquarters and the top court has yet to say who was right. What Özel called an inevitable farewell is also the opening of a contest over who carries the opposition into the next election.
Where it stands
This piece is the record of the announcement phase, 21 to 23 July, and is no longer being updated.
On 24 July the split became a party. Özel and 90 other members of parliament resigned from the CHP and filed the founding declaration for Yeni Parti with the Interior Ministry, 91 founders in total. The expectations set out above resolved close to what Özel's camp predicted: the petition went in on 24 July as reported, and the number of defecting lawmakers landed at 90 alongside him. The party's name, unknown when this was written, is Yeni Parti. Our continuing coverage moves to the piece below.