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Geopolitics · Europe · Sweden · Türkiye · the economy
Background

Türkiye's opposition split

A court ousted the CHP's elected leader, 91 of its 135 lawmakers walked out to found the New Party, and the Treasury money stayed with the CHP because state funding follows votes already cast. Since then the CHP has expelled 48 of Özgür Özel's allies, lost İzmir to Erdoğan's party, and sent its reinstated leader to meet the government's ally Devlet Bahçeli.

Türkiye's largest opposition party lost 91 of its 135 lawmakers in a day, and by 3 August 2026 the CHP ranked fifth by seats. In the first poll after the split the New Party came second on 19.4 percent to the CHP's 11.8. The New Party draws no Treasury money: state funding follows votes already cast.
Türkiye's opposition split

On 21 May 2026 a court annulled the 2023 CHP congress that had elected Özgür Özel chairman, citing alleged voter fraud, and reinstated his predecessor Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu. Days later police entered the party headquarters to enforce the ruling. On 24 July Özel signed the founding documents of the New Party, Yeni Parti, in Ankara. That same day 91 lawmakers, Özel among them, resigned from the CHP. That took the CHP from 135 seats to 44 and made the New Party the largest opposition group in parliament.

Özel and his supporters saw the ruling as judicial interference in the party's affairs. The government rejects that, calling the judiciary independent. Under Özel the CHP had won Istanbul and Ankara in 2024, the AK Party's worst defeat in over twenty years. Corruption investigations in CHP-run municipalities have since led to dozens of detentions, and the party's mayors have been leaving. On 7 October Erdoğan pinned an AK Party badge on İzmir's mayor Cemil Tugay. Kadıköy's mayor announced on 23 October that he had joined Özel's party.

ORC Research asked 1,920 people across 26 provinces, between 27 and 29 July, which party they would vote for in a general election that Sunday. The AK Party led on 32.5 percent; the New Party came second on 19.4. The CHP, the party Mustafa Kemal Atatürk founded, came third on 11.8, behind a party three days old when the fieldwork began. In Türkiye Today's seat count of 3 August the CHP ranked fifth, behind the DEM Party and the MHP.

Turkish law gives Treasury funding to parties that took at least 3 percent at a parliamentary election, in proportion to that vote. The New Party has not yet run in a national election, so it receives none and lives on private donations. It cannot qualify before the next parliamentary election, which is not due until 2028. The AK Party is set to take 2.55 billion lira from the Treasury in 2026 and the CHP 1.82 billion. In its first 48 hours the New Party took 182,068,243 lira from 85,975 people.

On 16 October Kılıçdaroğlu's disciplinary board expelled 48 members close to Özel, among them Selin Sayek Böke and Aylin Nazlıaka. Hürriyet Daily News reported that day that the Supreme Court of Appeals had still not ruled on the annulment. Neither side yet knows whether the ruling that broke the party will survive appeal. İmamoğlu, whom Özel said in July he would back for president, has been in custody since March 2025, and the court trying him set its next hearing for 2 November.

”The New Party was founded by the people, it will be strengthened by the people, and it will be carried to power by the people”
Özgür ÖzelLeader of the New Party, Yeni Parti, and former chairman of the CHP

The numbers

The court ruling that started it
A court annulled the congress that had elected Özel chairman on 21 May 2026, citing alleged voter fraud, and reinstated Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu. Days after the ruling, police entered the CHP headquarters to enforce the decision.
Al Jazeera
Lawmakers who left the CHP on 24 July 2026
91
Özel signed the New Party's founding documents in Ankara on 24 July 2026, and 91 lawmakers left the CHP, taking it from 135 seats to 44 and costing it main opposition status. Daily Sabah's headline counts 90 lawmakers besides Özel while its text says 91 resigned alongside him; the seat figures, 135 down to 44, put the total at 91 including him.
Daily Sabah
The CHP's rank in parliament by seats
5th
The AK Party has 277 lawmakers, the New Party 91, the DEM Party 56, the MHP 46 and the CHP 44, which places the CHP fifth. Parliament has 592 serving members in a chamber designed for 600. The figures are Türkiye Today's, published on 3 August 2026.
Türkiye Today
The New Party in ORC's first post-launch poll
19.4%
ORC Research put the AK Party on 32.5 percent, the New Party on 19.4 and the CHP on 11.8, with the DEM Party on 8.5, the MHP on 8.1 and the İYİ Party on 5.6. It asked 1,920 people across 26 provinces between 27 and 29 July 2026 which party they would vote for in a general election that Sunday. Türkiye Today reported it as the first poll conducted since the New Party's launch.
Türkiye Today
Donations to the New Party in 48 hours
182m lira
182,068,243 lira from 85,975 people in the first 48 hours of the campaign, announced by New Party lawmaker Özgür Ceylan on 31 July 2026. The first 24 hours had brought 113,841,910 lira from 31,934 people. Turkish Minute puts the 48-hour total at about 3.8 million dollars. Several New Party lawmakers pledged a month's parliamentary salary to the campaign.
Turkish Minute
Treasury funding in 2026, and who gets none
The AK Party is set to receive 2.55 billion lira in Treasury funding in 2026 and the CHP 1.82 billion, followed by the MHP on 721.5 million, the İYİ Party on 693.9 million and the DEM Party on 631.7 million. Parties qualify by taking at least 3 percent of the vote at a parliamentary election, and funding is tripled in parliamentary election years. The New Party has not yet run in a national election and is not eligible.
Turkish Minute
The request to lift Özel's parliamentary immunity, 4 August 2026
The Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor's Office said on 4 August 2026 that it had investigated Özgür Özel, MP for Manisa, and Veli Ağbaba, MP for Malatya, for the offence of "zincirleme şekilde rüşvet almak", taking bribes as a single continuing offence, under articles 252 and 43 of the penal code. It said it had drawn up summaries of proceedings and sent them to the Justice Ministry, taking the view that their immunity should be lifted under article 83 of the constitution. The alleged benefits concern candidacies for the local elections of 31 March 2024 and the CHP congress of 4 and 5 November 2023.
Hürriyet
The first New Party provincial chair jailed
İlksen Özalper, the New Party's chair in Manisa province, was detained at her home on 5 August 2026 and ordered held pending trial by a magistrate in Ankara on 8 August, on accusations of bribery and of membership of a criminal organisation formed for financial gain. The Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor's Office is investigating, on a file opened in İstanbul and transferred on jurisdictional grounds. Manisa is Özel's own province and constituency. Turkish Minute reports this as the first such action against one of the party's provincial leaders since it was founded in July.
Turkish Minute
When Türkiye next votes
2028
Türkiye's next election is due in 2028, and under the constitution Erdoğan may run again only if parliament votes to bring it forward during his current term. İmamoğlu, whom Özel said he would back for president, joined the New Party on 13 August 2026 and has been in custody since March 2025. Turkish Minute reports that the loss of his university degree puts his right to run for president in doubt.
Turkish Minute
How a municipality changes hands: Adalar, 23 September
three council members
The split costs the CHP municipalities without a single voter moving. In Istanbul's Adalar district three council members elected for the CHP voted on 23 September 2026 to install the AKP candidate Kemal Türkyılmaz as acting mayor. The district's CHP mayor Ali Ercan Akpolat was arrested on 23 June in a corruption investigation and suspended by the interior ministry, and his replacement Medine Pamuk resigned on 14 September citing her health. Özgür Çelik, the Istanbul provincial chairman, says pressure had shifted the balance in the council in the AKP's favour: one member had restrictions lifted in exchange for support, another was threatened with the demolition of his business and a third with arrest.
Turkish Minute
İzmir changes hands, 7 October 2026
President Erdoğan presented the AK Party badge to Cemil Tugay, mayor of İzmir, at a ceremony in Ankara on Wednesday 7 October 2026. It is the first time the AK Party will run Türkiye's third-largest city, a CHP stronghold where the AK Party has historically found little support. Tugay was elected in 2024 as a CHP candidate, beating the AK Party's Hamza Dağ by 48 percent to 37, in an election in which the CHP also took 28 of İzmir's 30 district municipalities. He left the CHP in June 2026, a month after the court ruling that reinstated Kılıçdaroğlu. Opposition supporters rallied against the switch the day before the ceremony. Daily Sabah counts 108 mayors who have joined the AK Party from other parties in the past two years, most of them from the CHP.
Daily Sabah
A mayor moving the other way: Kadıköy, 23 October 2026
30 of 36
Mesut Kösedağı, mayor of Istanbul's Kadıköy district, announced on 23 October 2026 that he had resigned from the CHP after 23 years as a member and joined the New Party, together with 30 of the district's 36 council members. He said the party had referred him to its disciplinary board the month before, asking for his definitive expulsion. After a meeting on 30 September the CHP had sought the expulsion of the mayors of Kadıköy, Sancaktepe and Sarıyer in Istanbul and of Konyaaltı and Alanya in Antalya. Hürriyet Daily News calls Kadıköy one of the districts often described as a CHP stronghold.
Hürriyet Daily News
The CHP expels 48, 16 October 2026
The CHP's high disciplinary board, formed after Kılıçdaroğlu's reinstatement, expelled 48 members on 16 October 2026, among them Aylin Nazlıaka, İlhan Cihaner, Selin Sayek Böke and Kerim Rota, all described as close to Özel. The stated grounds were that they had acted in coordination with another party while remaining CHP members. Hürriyet Daily News reports that several had been left in place as a precaution while the Supreme Court of Appeals' ruling in the absolute nullity case remained pending, and that the ruling had still not come. The same report counts 90 lawmakers leaving with Özel; the 91 used elsewhere on this page counts him too.
Hürriyet Daily News
Where İmamoğlu's trial stood on 18 October 2026
436 defendants
İmamoğlu has been in pretrial detention since March 2025 and went on trial on 9 March 2026. He began presenting his defence on 14 October 2026 and concluded it on 17 October, rejecting all allegations, arguing the case was politically motivated and denying any off-the-books structure within the municipality; he was then cross-examined. The trial involves 436 defendants, 53 of them in pretrial detention, and sat for its 101st day at the Marmara prison complex in Silivri. The court ordered seven releases, bringing the number held to 46, and set the third hearing for 2 November 2026. No verdict had been delivered when the court adjourned.
Hürriyet Daily News
The protest trial, 12 October 2026
A court acquitted 44 of the 45 defendants tried over the demonstrations at Saraçhane, the square outside Istanbul city hall that was the focus of the protests after İmamoğlu's arrest on 19 March 2025. The remaining defendant was sentenced to seven months and fifteen days for inciting the commission of a crime over a social media post, and the court deferred announcement of the verdict, a measure that can annul a conviction if conditions are met during a set period. Hundreds were detained in connection with the protests.
Hürriyet Daily News
What the CHP accuses Özel of, 14 October 2026
Daily Sabah, citing other outlets’ reports of CHP sources, says the party is preparing a criminal complaint against Özel over document forgery and breach of trust involving parliamentary membership fees. The allegation is that a letter dated 23 April 2026, carrying 138 lawmakers' signatures, was sent to a bank asking that fees deducted from salaries be transferred to lawmakers' own accounts, while the attached account list covered only 100 of them, and that signatures collected for unrelated Constitutional Court applications were used without consent. The CHP has separately alleged that assets worth more than 250 million lira went missing from its provincial and district offices as the New Party was formed.
Daily Sabah

What the comparison shows

Where they agree

Al Jazeera, the pro-government Daily Sabah and Türkiye Today all report that the CHP was left with 44 seats, and all three trace the break to the court ruling rather than to a vote inside the party. Al Jazeera and Türkiye Today both put the AK Party on 277 seats, a figure Daily Sabah's report does not give. Daily Sabah and Türkiye Today both record that main opposition status passed to the New Party. On 14 October Daily Sabah called the CHP the main opposition in one report and the New Party the main opposition in another, so this page gives seat counts rather than the title.

Where they split

The disagreement is about what the May ruling was. For Özel's side it is the judiciary reaching into a party, of a piece with the investigations that have detained CHP officials and jailed İmamoğlu. For the government it is an ordinary legal case about a flawed congress, and evidence that democratic and legal institutions are functioning. Neither outlet states the court's reasoning as established fact: Al Jazeera says the court cited alleged voter fraud, and Turkish Minute that the litigation concerned allegations of vote-buying at the 2023 congress.

What nobody is saying

The CHP and the New Party together come to 31.2 percent in ORC's poll, against 32.5 for the AK Party. That addition is ours: ORC published the parties separately and no combined figure. None of the sources here gives a CHP poll number from before the split, so we cannot say whether the opposition as a whole has grown or shrunk. No poll on this page is more recent than the end of July, so nothing here measures what the autumn's defections, expulsions and trials have done to any party's support.

Who says what

Özgür Özel, Leader of the New Party, Yeni Parti, and former chairman of the CHP

Özel presents the new party as built by the public rather than by an apparatus, which is also an argument about where its money comes from. He launched the donation campaign himself, at a point when the party could not yet take members: registration with the Supreme Court of Appeals and other state bodies had to be completed first.

”The New Party was founded by the people, it will be strengthened by the people, and it will be carried to power by the people”The New Party was founded by the people, it will be strengthened by the people, and it will be carried to power by the people
Source: Turkish Minute · Friday, 31 July 2026 · Özel posted these words on X. Turkish Minute publishes in English, and the wording quoted here is its rendering of the post.
Özgür Ceylan, New Party lawmaker, announcing the fundraising totals

Turkish Minute reports that a party with no Treasury allocation has to run on private donations. Announcing 85,975 donors in 48 hours is therefore a claim about how broad the party's support is, not just a sum of money.

”We will continue to transparently disclose information about the donations.”We will continue to transparently disclose information about the donations.
Source: Turkish Minute · Friday, 31 July 2026 · Turkish Minute publishes in English, and the wording quoted here is its rendering of Ceylan's announcement.
Turkish government, The AK Party government, responding to claims that the courts were used against the opposition

The government rejects the claim that it intervened in the judiciary. On its account the legal case that removed Özel was an internal dispute inside the CHP, and the annulment was evidence that democratic and legal institutions were functioning. It is Al Jazeera that reports this position; no named minister is quoted.

Source: Al Jazeera · Tuesday, 28 July 2026
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, President of Türkiye

Erdoğan is inviting the opposition in rather than shutting it out. Opening the new legislative year he urged parties to strengthen the home front and work towards what he calls a grand Türkiye consensus, and said agreement on a terror-free Türkiye had upset the country's foes. Daily Sabah reads Kılıçdaroğlu's fifteen minutes in Devlet Bahçeli's parliamentary office on 13 October as that consensus moving closer, and notes that the New Party left the chamber as Erdoğan took the floor.

”The era of opposition solely based on opposing what the government does is over. It is a grave mistake to reduce politics to antagonizing rivals and waging a war of attrition instead of making it a race to provide the best public services.”The era of opposition solely based on opposing what the government does is over. It is a grave mistake to reduce politics to antagonizing rivals and waging a war of attrition instead of making it a race to provide the best public services.
Source: Daily Sabah · Wednesday, 14 October 2026 · Said to parliament at the ceremony opening the new legislative year in early October 2026, and carried in Daily Sabah's 14 October report on the Bahçeli meeting. Erdoğan spoke Turkish and the wording is the outlet's English rendering, which spells antagonizing the American way.

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