A total of 280 former lawmakers from Turkey’s main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) announced on Monday that they were resigning to support the newly established New Party, deepening a split in the opposition three days after the party’s launch, the Cumhuriyet daily reported.
The announcement signals substantial support among former CHP politicians for New Party Chairman Özgür Özel, who established the movement with 90 other sitting lawmakers after a court removed him from CHP leadership in May and reinstated his predecessor, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu.
In a joint statement on Monday the former lawmakers said they were leaving the CHP “out of responsibility toward our party’s core values and Turkey’s bright future.”
They pledged support for the New Party’s political vision, describing it as committed to democracy, the rule of law, pluralism, social democracy and the founding principles of the Turkish Republic.
The statement also called for internal party democracy and primary elections involving all party members.
The signatories characterized their departure as temporary, saying they were leaving until the CHP’s “legal personality” could one day be reclaimed.
Özel and 90 other CHP lawmakers resigned on Friday and formally established the New Party. With 91 seats in Turkey’s 600-member parliament, the party has overtaken the CHP as the country’s main opposition group.
The departures reduced the CHP’s representation to 44 seats, making it the fifth-largest party in parliament.
Meanwhile, Özel told the Sözcü daily on Monday that his party would not recognize the court-reinstated CHP administration as a legitimate political counterpart because it had not been elected.
“The CHP is currently being run by people who were not elected,” he said. “Politics is conducted with elected representatives. We will not treat an administration appointed by a court as a political counterpart, either positively or negatively.”
Özel said his allies had exhausted the available legal avenues inside the CHP but ultimately concluded that establishing a new party had become unavoidable.
Former CHP chairman Kılıçdaroğlu, who returned to the leadership following the court ruling, said over the weekend that the party had “largely completed” what he described as a process of purification.
He said there was no place in the CHP for politicians involved in corruption.
His remarks reflected the government’s narrative surrounding a sweeping crackdown on the CHP that began after the party defeated President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) in the 2024 local elections.
At least 27 CHP mayors have been jailed pending trial, while hundreds of party officials have been detained or arrested, primarily on corruption-related allegations.
The CHP under Özel rejected the accusations as part of a government campaign to sideline Erdoğan’s elected rivals. The government denies interfering in the judiciary and maintains that the investigations concern criminal misconduct.
Separately, İzmir Mayor Cemil Tugay, who resigned from the CHP before the New Party’s launch, said he would continue serving as an independent. He also denied speculation that he planned to join President Erdoğan’s AKP.
The split follows a May ruling by an Ankara appeals court that annulled the CHP’s November 2023 congress over allegations of vote buying and manipulation. The ruling removed Özel and the party bodies elected under his leadership and reinstated Kılıçdaroğlu and his former administration. The CHP leadership under Özel rejected the decision as politically motivated judicial interference.
Özel had defeated Kılıçdaroğlu at the 2023 congress following the CHP’s loss in that year’s presidential election. Under Özel, the party finished first nationwide in the March 2024 local elections.
He later emerged as the public face of the opposition after İstanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, the CHP’s presidential candidate and Erdoğan’s most prominent political rival, was jailed pending trial on corruption charges in March 2025. İmamoğlu and the opposition say the prosecution is politically motivated, an allegation the government denies.