Turkey Opposition Split: Özel Forms New Party With 91 MPs

Özgür Özel answered a court’s removal of him from the Republican People’s Party by taking most of the parliamentary opposition with him. He and 90 other lawmakers resigned from the CHP and registered the New Party on July 24, the anniversary of the Treaty of Lausanne. The new group begins with 91 seats in the 600-member parliament, making it the main opposition behind President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s 277-seat AKP. Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu’s restored CHP falls to 44.

That is a parliamentary victory and an electoral gamble. The May court ruling annulled the 2023 congress that elected Özel and returned Kılıçdaroğlu to the leadership, a decision Özel’s supporters regard as part of the legal campaign against elected opposition figures. Leaving preserved his caucus and personal authority. It also abandoned the CHP name and organisation built over a century. Al-Monitor’s assessment is that Özel now has to survive further legal pressure, hold together an ideologically varied coalition and construct a party capable of challenging Erdoğan, all at once. A July AREA poll put the prospective New Party at 16.5% before undecided voters were allocated, ahead of the CHP’s 10% but far behind the AKP’s 29.1%.

The split can therefore produce either a cleaner opposition or two rival institutions fighting over the same electorate. Özel said his priority is opposing Erdoğan rather than the CHP. That discipline will be tested in candidate selection, municipal alliances and access to the media. The New Party has enough MPs to dominate parliamentary scrutiny, but not enough to block the government without Kurdish and other opposition partners.

The peace process with the PKK is the first issue that requires such cooperation. One year after the organisation’s symbolic weapons burning, parliament is preparing framework legislation for a “terror-free Türkiye.” Abdullah Öcalan is asking for a legal structure that moves politics away from violence, while the PKK says a law that does not include his physical freedom will solve nothing. Middle East Policy scholar Michael Gunter argues that the process remains unlikely to succeed without constitutional recognition of Kurdish rights, although Ankara could strengthen itself by granting them. The practical compromise under discussion—supervised residence for Öcalan, contingent on verified disarmament—shows how far talks have moved and how much political risk remains.

Turkey’s security perimeter meanwhile kept expanding. A suspected Ukrainian drone struck the Turkish-flagged bulk carrier Reyhan Sarı off the Samsun coast, killing one sailor and injuring three while it carried coal from Russia to Trabzon. Days earlier, authorities destroyed an explosive-laden drone that washed ashore in Istanbul. On the Montreux Convention’s 90th anniversary, both incidents demonstrated why Ankara’s control of the Bosporus and Dardanelles is more than diplomatic symbolism. Turkey has limited the passage of belligerent warships, but it cannot keep long-range drones away from civilian traffic.

Energy policy offers a more deliberate form of strategic distance. A 15-year agreement for 33 billion cubic metres from Azerbaijan’s Absheron field and long-term US LNG contracts are reducing Russia’s dominance. Russian gas supplied about 37% of Turkish imports in early 2025, down from 60% two decades earlier; US LNG reached 9.19 bcm in 2025, or 16% of the market. Regasification capacity grew from 32 million cubic metres a day in 2016 to 161 million in 2025. The diversification does not end dependence, but it gives Ankara options that opposition politics still lacks.

Özel has created an institution large enough to survive the ruling that removed him. He has not yet created a coalition broad enough to win. The next phase of the Kurdish peace law, the treatment of critical journalists such as Alican Uludağ and the New Party’s first alliances will show whether this is a democratic reset or another fragmentation Erdoğan can manage.