Özgür Özel said on Tuesday he will resign from the Republican People's Party (CHP) and found a new one, the sharpest turn yet in a leadership crisis that has gripped Türkiye's main opposition for two months. He made the announcement in a speech to more than 80 lawmakers in parliament, according to Reuters and TRT Haber.
"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.
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-installed 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 a court-installed chairman 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.