In a major political shakeup rocking Turkey’s opposition landscape, former chair of Turkey’s main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) Ozgur Ozel formally launched a new political bloc Friday, officially registering the self-named “New Party” with Turkey’s Interior Ministry just moments after he and 90 fellow CHP legislators resigned from the decades-old party. The long-awaited formation of the new opposition force comes months after a court ruling removed Ozel from his CHP leadership post, a decision that has deepened divisions in Turkish politics and spurred mass protests in support of the ousted leader.
The sequence of events that led to this split traces back to May 2024, when an appeals court annulled the results of a 2023 CHP party congress that had appointed Ozel as the party’s new chair. Citing unproven claims of voting irregularities, the court reinstated 77-year-old Kemal Kilicdaroglu, who led the CHP for 13 years. Many political analysts broadly characterize Kilicdaroglu’s tenure as marked by ineffective opposition to long-serving President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Ozel’s removal from the CHP leadership sparked immediate widespread outrage among the party’s base, with supporters dismissing the court order as a politically motivated maneuver designed to weaken Turkey’s fragmented opposition ahead of key political contests.
In a social media video posted to X following the formal registration, Ozel signed the document formalizing his exit from Turkey’s oldest established political party and offered a hopeful message for the new movement: “May it be auspicious for our homeland, our nation, and our party.”
Supporters of Ozel frame his ouster as one piece of a broader two-year crackdown on CHP officials across the country. During that period, hundreds of elected mayors and municipal leaders from CHP-run local governments have been detained as part of criminal investigations, most centered on allegations of corruption. Among the most high-profile detentions is Ekrem Imamoglu, the popular former mayor of Istanbul who was widely viewed as the strongest single challenger to Erdogan. Imamoglu, who remains a CHP member, has been imprisoned since March 2023 and faces charges that could carry decades of prison time if he is convicted. As of Friday, there was no official confirmation on whether Imamoglu would leave the CHP to join Ozel’s new bloc.
The Erdogan administration has repeatedly pushed back against claims of political interference in the justice system, insisting that Turkey’s courts operate independently and free from government pressure.
Notably, Ozel led the CHP to one of its most significant electoral gains in recent years during the 2024 municipal elections, where the party delivered a major rebuke to Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). Despite that success, Ozel was unable to reverse the court’s annulment of his leadership win, and split from the party after Kilicdaroglu refused repeated calls to hold a new leadership vote to resolve the internal crisis.
With 91 legislators holding seats in Turkey’s 600-seat national parliament, the New Party is on track to displace the CHP as Turkey’s official main opposition bloc. Following the mass defection, the remaining CHP caucus holds just 44 parliamentary seats. Erdogan’s AKP, an Islam-oriented conservative party that has held power for more than two decades, retains a 277-seat majority in the legislature.