Erdogan’s party faces shock challenge as Özel’s new movement surges to 30% support

Turkey’s political landscape is being dramatically reshaped after a new party led by former Republican People’s Party (CHP) leader Özgür Özel emerged as the country’s most popular political force, according to a new MetroPOLL survey.

The July poll puts Özel’s newly established Yeni Parti (New Party) on 30.3% support, almost eight percentage points ahead of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), which stands at 22.4%. The figures are based on voters’ stated preferences without redistributing the votes of undecided respondents.

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The pro-Kurdish DEM Party is on 5.4%, followed by the Good Party on 3.9% and the nationalist Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) on 3.6%. Meanwhile, the CHP, which has been returned to the leadership of Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu following a controversial court ruling, has collapsed to just 2.9%.

Özel announced the creation of the new formation after a court annulled the CHP congress at which he had been elected leader. He was joined by 94 MPs, stripping the CHP of its position as Turkey’s largest opposition force in parliament.

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“We have transformed the opposition in Turkey into a social movement. There is no going back. The era when politics was made inside the parliament buildings in Ankara is over,” New Party Secretary-General Yunus Emre said days after Özel, until recently the opposition leader, announced the new organisation.

The New Party is not yet legally eligible to contest elections. But it is already capturing the political imagination and, at least in theory, could give Özel a second electoral victory over Erdoğan’s coalition at a future national vote.

Its success is likely to depend not only on who it puts forward as its candidate, but also on the local political structures Özel moved to secure almost immediately after the party was established.

For now, however, the numbers have given him an unexpected opening.

Erdoğan’s opposition gamble

Erdoğan stands to gain significantly from the split in the opposition triggered by a Turkish court this year. The court ruling restored Kılıçdaroğlu, Özel’s predecessor, to the leadership of the CHP, reversing the political succession that had produced one of the biggest opposition breakthroughs in modern Turkish politics.

Under Özel, the CHP won the 2024 local elections and emerged as the largest party nationwide for the first time in more than two decades. Since then, pressure on the CHP has intensified.

Özel is now betting on the enormous political energy he has displayed, combined with support from as many local party organisations as possible. He has already claimed that much of the party’s grassroots machinery is behind him.

But the risks are equally enormous. Several prominent CHP figures have yet to join him.

How it started

CHP headquarters was tear-gassed in May, as the old leadership was due to be removed from the building, came at another difficult geopolitical moment, with the world caught between two wars.

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The scenes echoed the arrest of Istanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu and his removal from electoral politics 14 months earlier. Özel took over as CHP leader in 2023. Six months earlier, the opposition had captured most of Turkey’s major cities.

The government subsequently increased pressure on CHP figures in those cities. A year after the opposition’s defeat in the presidential election, İmamoğlu was arrested on charges his allies have repeatedly described as politically motivated, effectively removing one of the opposition’s strongest potential candidates from electoral politics.

Özel, who had until then remained largely in İmamoğlu’s shadow and was considered close to him, managed to bring thousands of people onto the streets despite a ban on mass gatherings in the days surrounding the court decision.

He travelled across Turkey holding major rallies and organised a fresh CHP congress to reaffirm his leadership after it became clear that the courts intended to use the November 2023 congress to establish that his leadership was illegitimate.

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When the court returned Kılıçdaroğlu to the leadership last month, he promised to convene a new congress. Instead, he began purging the party. Kılıçdaroğlu had lost the presidential election to Erdoğan three years earlier. His return to the leadership has split opposition supporters who had previously backed him as the joint candidate of a six-party alliance.

Erdoğan successfully turned that campaign in his favour. For months, Özel tried to demonstrate that he remained the legitimate party leader. In July he confirmed an idea that had been circulating and later he founded the New Party.

Özel hopes to secure the legal status needed for the party to contest national elections by October. The latest polling suggests that ambition may be considerably more realistic than it first appeared.

Sources: MetroPOLL, Dnevnik,bg, BGNES

Caption: CHP leader Özgür Özel who was removed from the CHP leadership by court order addresses his supporters during a rally in front of the Turkish Grand National Assembly in Ankara, Turkey, 9 June 2026. EPA/NECATI SAVAS