Turkey’s main opposition CHP party’s court-installed leader, Kemal Kilicdaroglu delivers a speech at the party’s headquarters in Ankara on May 30, 2026.
ADEM ALTAN/AFP via Getty Images
On Sunday, Turkey’s court-restored opposition chief Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu appeared as a marriage witness at a wedding ceremony in Istanbul’s Avcılar district — standing side by side at the register with Seyithan İzsiz, a lawmaker from President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s ruling AKP party. The image crystallized a political moment that Turkey’s opposition may not recover from quickly: less than two weeks after 91 lawmakers abandoned the Republican People’s Party (CHP) to launch a rival movement, Kılıçdaroğlu is being framed — literally and symbolically — as a leader of purification, even as the party he leads holds fewer parliamentary seats than at any point since 2002. DHA covered the Avcılar wedding in full on August 2, 2026.
A Wedding That Became a Political Portrait
The ceremony was held for Tuğçe Bekmez and Sinan Ok at a venue in Avcılar’s Denizköşkler neighborhood. When Kılıçdaroğlu was called to the stage to co-sign the marriage register alongside İzsiz, the master of ceremonies announced him as “the leader who will bring cleansing and purification” — language borrowed directly from Kılıçdaroğlu’s own political mission statement since reclaiming the CHP chairmanship. The ezan (call to prayer) rang out mid-ceremony, briefly pausing the proceedings. After the register was signed, Kılıçdaroğlu handed the marriage certificate to the bride with a light-hearted folk admonition: “Step on the groom’s foot first” — a Turkish tradition said to signal who will have the upper hand in the marriage. DHA’s report on the Avcılar ceremony and Karar’s account of the ceremony both confirmed these details.
That an AKP lawmaker and the CHP chief shared a marriage register is not, by itself, extraordinary in a country where personal and civic relationships cross political lines. What makes the image arresting is the context: a week earlier, the opposition formation those two men nominally represent had completed its most consequential rupture in modern history.
How a Court Order Tore Turkey’s Oldest Party Apart
The CHP, founded by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in 1923, had for years held the position of Turkey’s main opposition force. That status ended on July 24, 2026, when 90 lawmakers loyal to former CHP chairman Özgür Özel resigned from the party and filed the founding documents for the Yeni Parti — the New Party (YP) — with Turkey’s Interior Ministry. Bianet’s reporting on the YP founding covers the full sequence.
The court ruling that made this split inevitable came two months earlier, in May 2026. An appellate court declared the CHP’s November 2023 congress “absolutely null,” citing alleged vote-buying and the use of promises of party appointments to secure delegate support. That congress had elected Özel as party chairman, ending Kılıçdaroğlu’s 14-year tenure. The court’s ruling removed Özel from office and reinstated Kılıçdaroğlu — an outcome Özel and his supporters immediately condemned as judicial interference in the internal affairs of a political party. The Al Jazeera New Party explainer lays out the legal sequence in detail.
Days after the ruling, police entered CHP headquarters in Ankara to enforce the decision. Members aligned with Özel placed furniture at the building’s entrance in resistance; several were subsequently removed by police, and teargas was reportedly used during the operation. The Bianet founding story and Al Jazeera both confirmed the enforcement action.
The Turkish government has consistently rejected accusations of judicial manipulation. Officials describe the charges against Özel’s congress as a legitimate legal process; they point out that the original complaints came from CHP members aligned with the Kılıçdaroğlu faction, and that the decision was not initiated by the state.
What the Numbers Mean for Turkey’s Parliament
The scale of the rupture is measurable and significant. Prior to the split, the CHP held approximately 135 seats in Turkey’s 600-seat Grand National Assembly. The departure of 91 lawmakers reduced that group to 44 — stripping the party of the “main opposition” designation it had held continuously since 2002. Bianet’s founding coverage confirms the seat collapse.
The new Yeni Parti, which registered with the Court of Cassation on the day of its founding, immediately became the parliament’s second-largest force and the largest single opposition bloc, with 91 seats. The AKP holds 277 seats. OSW’s full parliamentary breakdown confirms the seat distribution.
Opinion polls published before YP’s formal launch suggested the new party could attract substantial support — one survey placed YP at 35%, ahead of the AKP on 30%, while support for the rump CHP had fallen to roughly 5%. Those numbers should be read with caution: they reflect anticipated support prior to the party’s first real electoral test, and YP has yet to contest a single by-election. The OSW analysis attributes these polls to pre-launch surveys without independently verifying the underlying polling data.
The Two Parties, the Two Claims to the Same Legacy
Özel and his supporters portray the split as a principled response to judicial interference in the opposition’s internal democracy. His critics — and Kılıçdaroğlu himself — argue it was primarily a maneuver by a leadership faction to preserve political influence after losing its institutional base, and that the court’s ruling was legally legitimate regardless of its political optics.
What both sides share, according to Warsaw-based OSW Centre for Eastern Studies analyst Zuzanna Krzyżanowska, is a claim to the same historical identity. As she wrote in the OSW analysis: the contest is not between competing ideologies but between rival claims to one political legacy — the CHP retains its name, symbols, and historical connection to the Republic’s founding, while Yeni Parti has brought together most of the lawmakers who until recently represented that same tradition.
Özel chose July 24 deliberately: the date marks the anniversary of the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, which established the borders of modern Turkey. He opened the party’s founding process by visiting the Hacı Bayram mosque in Ankara and the tomb of the Ottoman-era mystic Hacı Bayram-ı Veli — a gesture aimed at secular Kemalist and conservative audiences alike. A Daily Sabah column documented the Lausanne symbolism in detail.
Speaking to the Sözcü newspaper, Özel said he would no longer pay attention to the CHP because it was “run by the appointed” — a reference to the court-ordered reinstatement of Kılıçdaroğlu — and described the party’s opponents as “the losers of two elections,” referring to both Kılıçdaroğlu, who lost the 2023 presidential race to Erdoğan, and to the AKP, which lost major cities in the 2024 local elections.
The Casting Agency Controversy: Allegations and Denials
Three days after YP’s founding, an undercover report by BirGün newspaper journalist Ebru Çelik alleged that CHP’s Istanbul provincial organization had recruited hundreds of paid participants through casting agencies to fill a party membership ceremony attended by Kılıçdaroğlu on July 25 in Istanbul’s Sarıyer district. Bianet covered the casting allegation in detail.
According to the report, participants were paid ₺950 each — approximately $20 — and given instructions on when to applaud, chant slogans such as “Kılıçdaroğlu is the hope of the people” and wave flags during speeches. One participant, Sezer Çakmak, told the ANF news agency that attendees believed they had been recruited for a film or television production, not a political event. Turkish Minute reported that journalists faced a criminal investigation over the story.
The CHP denied the allegations. Party spokesperson Müslim Sarı branded them “immoral accusations” and pledged legal action. The Istanbul Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office subsequently launched an investigation — but targeted the journalist, not the party, after Istanbul CHP chair Gürsel Tekin filed a criminal complaint against Çelik over the report. Press freedom groups condemned the investigation. The Turkish Minute investigation report documents the full complaint process. The owner of one casting agency acknowledged recruiting people for the ceremony but claimed it did so without any CHP instruction or financing.
The Risks Facing Yeni Parti
OSW’s analysis of YP vulnerabilities identifies three structural challenges facing the party.
The first is organizational: YP has no local office infrastructure, no party staff in most of Turkey’s 81 provinces, and — critically — no access to state party funding, which remains with the CHP despite the transfer of MPs.
The second is political: to win in 2028, YP must expand beyond disaffected CHP voters and attract undecided voters and those from other parties. Its founding platform has been deliberately vague, avoiding detailed policy positions that might alienate Kurdish voters, nationalists, or religious conservatives. That vagueness is a short-term political asset and a long-term structural weakness.
The third is legal: Özel himself faces multiple ongoing judicial investigations, including allegations of insulting the president and resisting police. Parliament is reportedly considering a vote to lift the parliamentary immunity of YP members. The government’s chief presidential adviser, Mehmet Uçum, has described YP as “insignificant” and alleged its founding roster is composed of corrupt figures. OSW warns that the authorities are likely to seek Özel’s removal from political life, potentially through arrest.
As of early August, 10 of the 30 provinces previously governed by CHP mayors had declared support for YP. Ankara Mayor Mansur Yavaş — one of Turkey’s most popular politicians and previously seen as a potential CHP presidential candidate — had not yet publicly declared his position. The OSW analysis tracks provincial defections as of July 29.
What This Means for Turkish Democracy — and Why Academics Are Watching
Political scientists who study democratic erosion have a term for what just happened to Turkey’s opposition: asymmetrical party system fragmentation, or APSF. The concept describes a situation in which a ruling party maintains electoral unity while the opposition fractures into smaller, competing entities — and it is identified in comparative politics literature as the single strongest structural predictor of successful democratic backsliding by an incumbent.
Turkey’s trajectory fits the pattern. The European Centre for Populism Studies, in a May 2026 ECPS analysis, described Turkey’s political environment as “managed permanence: lawfare, institutional capture, and the end of democratic uncertainty” — noting that the same emergency-state machinery deployed against alleged Gülenists and Kurdish organizations after 2016 has now expanded to encompass CHP mayors, party officials, journalists, and the party leadership itself. A Transparency International report on state capture in the Western Balkans and Turkey named Turkey explicitly as a jurisdiction where undue influence over the judiciary and law-making had created conditions for systemic corruption with impunity.
Whether the split ultimately weakens or strengthens the opposition is genuinely uncertain. Pre-launch polling suggested YP could draw more support than either the CHP or the AKP. Analyst Birol Başkan, writing in late July, noted that voters remain politically available despite the CHP’s division, giving Yeni Parti an unusual opportunity. But the party faces those opportunities in a political environment where the state apparatus has already demonstrated its willingness to detain opposition mayors, reverse election results, and change party leadership through court orders.
For context, the CHP’s presidential candidate for the 2028 elections — Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu — has been imprisoned since March 2025 on corruption and terrorism-support allegations that he and his supporters deny. The Al Jazeera account of the split confirms İmamoğlu’s imprisonment and his role as the formal presidential candidate of both parties.
What Comes Next
The 2028 parliamentary elections are the next hard deadline. YP has stated its goal is to win power at that vote. Between now and then, the party must build local offices, secure funding through donations rather than state allocation, and survive what the OSW analysis warns will be sustained pressure from a government determined to prevent its electoral success.
Kılıçdaroğlu and the rump CHP, meanwhile, face a different challenge: governing a party reduced to 44 seats, stripped of its most prominent figures, and beset by allegations that its Istanbul membership events require paid extras to fill the hall. His appearance at Sunday’s Avcılar wedding — announced to the crowd as a leader of “cleansing and purification” — signals the rhetorical direction he intends to take. Whether the voters he needs to win back will interpret that framing as credible moral leadership, or as the performance of a man restored to power by a court rather than an election, remains the defining question of Turkish opposition politics heading into 2028. DHA confirmed the ceremony text verbatim.
Exchange rate note: ₺950 converted at approximately $20 USD, based on the exchange rate as of August 2, 2026; conversions are approximate.
Frequently Asked QuestionsWhy did Turkey’s main opposition party split?
The split followed a May 2026 court ruling that declared the CHP’s November 2023 internal congress “absolutely null” — annulling the election of Özgür Özel as party chairman and reinstating his predecessor, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu. Özel and his supporters viewed the ruling as judicial interference in the party’s internal democracy; the Turkish government and the Kılıçdaroğlu faction maintained it was a legitimate legal finding based on genuine vote-buying allegations. Unable to regain control through legal appeals or by forcing an extraordinary congress, Özel led 90 MPs out of the CHP on July 24, 2026, to found the Yeni Parti. Bianet’s detailed account of the founding covers the full sequence.
What is the Yeni Parti, and is it likely to replace the CHP as Turkey’s main opposition?
Yeni Parti (the New Party, or YP) defines itself as a social democratic party with an explicitly anti-Erdoğan stance. With 91 MPs, it is currently Turkey’s largest single opposition bloc in the 600-seat parliament. Pre-launch polls placed it at around 35% — ahead of the ruling AKP — but the party has yet to contest an election, lacks local office infrastructure, receives no state funding, and faces the prospect of legal pressure against its leadership, including the potential arrest of Özel himself. Whether it consolidates CHP voters or fragments them further is the central unanswered question of Turkish opposition politics. The OSW analysis on YP’s prospects maps all three structural vulnerabilities.
What does this split mean for the broader state of Turkish democracy?
Political scientists identify what happened to Turkey’s opposition as a textbook instance of asymmetrical party system fragmentation — a phenomenon in which a ruling party maintains electoral unity while the opposition fractures into competing entities. Peer-reviewed comparative politics research identifies this as the strongest structural predictor of successful democratic backsliding by an incumbent executive. The European Centre for Populism Studies and Transparency International have both previously identified Turkey as a case of state capture through judicial manipulation. The CHP split follows a multi-year pattern in which opposition mayors have been detained, party offices have been raided, and now the party’s own elected leadership has been replaced by court order. The ECPS analysis on Turkey’s managed permanence provides the academic framework, and comparative politics literature identifies asymmetrical fragmentation as the single strongest predictor of democratic backsliding.
What is Ekrem İmamoğlu’s role in all of this?
İmamoğlu, the elected mayor of Istanbul, has been in prison since March 2025 facing corruption and terrorism-support charges that he and his supporters deny. He is widely seen as the most credible potential presidential challenger to Erdoğan and is the official presidential candidate of both the YP and, formally, of the CHP. The arrests of İmamoğlu and dozens of other CHP-affiliated mayors are central to why Özel’s faction viewed the broader political environment as an existential threat requiring a new party rather than continued internal party battles. Many analysts believe Özel is following İmamoğlu’s political direction from prison. Al Jazeera on İmamoğlu’s candidacy covers his imprisonment and formal candidate status.