Ninety MPs Walk Out: Inside the Split That Could Reshape Turkey's Opposition

Ninety members of parliament resigned from Turkey's main opposition bloc in a single week. That is the number that matters here, and its scale is the story: a walkout of roughly 90 MPs from the Republican People's Party (CHP) — by the count of NTV, with Axar.az reporting 91 — to follow their suspended former leader, Özgür Özel, into a brand-new political formation that has already filed paperwork at the Interior Ministry under the placeholder name "Yeni Parti," or "New Party." ¹⁰¹¹

The break is not abstract. It is the most consequential realignment of Turkey's opposition since the CHP first rallied around a single challenger to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and it happens with the next presidential and parliamentary elections due by May 2028.

On Tuesday, July 21, 2026, Özel told a CHP parliamentary group meeting in Ankara that he was leaving the party he had been chosen to lead, and that he would establish a new one. Türkiye Today had reported the day before that the new formation was expected to be formally registered the next week, and within days, a founding petition bearing Özel's signature alongside that of 90 CHP defectors had been delivered to the Interior Ministry. ⁵⁸¹⁰¹¹

None of the reporting reviewed offers a clean pull-quote from Özel's announcement; sources that reference his words truncate mid-sentence, and the rest paraphrase his case for going alone. What is on the record is the action, not the rhetoric: resignations filed, a founding petition signed, an application lodged.

The split has a courtroom at its origin. In May, a Turkish court removed Özel from the CHP leadership and reinstated his predecessor, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu. The ouster images aired in the early morning of May 24, according to Deutsche Welle — one day later than the date that circulated in the broadcast's narration. ³⁴

From that point on, the CHP had two claimants to its leadership and one set of party rules. By July, the dispute had moved from court filings to a mass resignation drive. More than 700 members, officials and elected representatives announced they were leaving the CHP within two days of Özel's announcement, across at least ten provinces and the Netherlands, per Turkish Minute — a tally built from public statements rather than official party rolls. ⁶

The CHP held roughly 135 seats in parliament before the walkout. Reports differ on exactly how many lawmakers crossed the floor: the broadcast put the figure at "roughly 80 of 135"; NTV's coverage puts it at 90 MPs; Axar.az reports 91. Both of those counts would make Özel's new bloc the largest opposition formation in the chamber. ¹⁰¹¹

The CHP's full pre-split strength is itself a moving target, and the difference between 80 and 91 matters because it changes whether Kılıçdaroğlu's rump party retains enough lawmakers to qualify as a parliamentary group at all — a question with real consequences for speaking time, committee seats and ballot access. The two counts are close enough that both are plausible; they cannot both be exactly right.

The split lands in a country that has spent two years filling its opposition benches with empty chairs. Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, the figure many CHP voters had seen as the natural challenger to Erdoğan, has been in prison since March 2025 on corruption charges that opposition parties argue are politically motivated. Local reporting tallies more than twenty opposition mayors currently behind bars and more than thirty suspended since the 2024 local elections. The cumulative effect is that the opposition benches entering the 2028 cycle are simultaneously smaller than they were and, with Özel's walkout, newly divided.

That is the headline calculation for Erdoğan. A fractured opposition does not need to be a defeated opposition to be useful; in a presidential race that turns on margins, splitting the anti-Erdoğan vote between two parties can achieve almost the same result as beating it.

Filing the founding petition is the easy part. The harder sequence is laid out by Al-Monitor and the trade press: register the party, survive any legal challenge to the name "Yeni Parti," ratify a parliamentary group, build a national organization from scratch, and do it all before the official campaign clock begins. The Interior Ministry application reportedly includes a backup name in case the primary one runs into registration trouble. ⁷¹¹

None of the sources reviewed carries a verified poll of how the new party would perform head-to-head against Erdoğan's AKP, and none confirms the broadcast's claim that three independent polls already show the new formation ahead by 8 to 9 points. The economic backdrop the broadcast cites — food inflation running above 30 percent, off peaks above 60 percent in 2023 — is also absent from the reporting on hand. Those figures are plausible, but they are not on this page until someone who can be cited puts them there.