A total of 625 members of the Nationalist Movement Party’s (MHP) Kocaeli and Bursa provincial branches have resigned to join former MHP deputy Meral Akşener, who was expelled from the party, in her efforts to establish a new political party.
According to a Hürriyet story on Wednesday, 410 MHP members from Kocaeli’s Gölcük district and 215 from Bursa’s Yenişehir district branches resigned.
At the end of June, Akşener was joined by former MHP deputies and prominent figures Ümit Özdağ and Koray Aydın, who were also expelled from the party in early March.
After adopting a critical stance against MHP leader Devlet Bahçeli and standing as a candidate for party leadership against him, Akşener was expelled by the MHP disciplinary committee in September 2016 by unanimous vote.
Akşener recently announced that a new political party that is to be “neither right, nor left” would be formed under her leadership in the early fall of 2017.
