The Good Party (İP) would have preferred to not lose three of its founding members, Deputy Chairman Ümit Özdağ said Thursday.
Yusuf Halaçoğlu, Özcan Yeniçeri and Nevzat Bor, three of İP's founding members resigned earlier this week.
"They were respected members of the party and I would prefer that they stayed," Özdağ said.
The trio in a press conference Monday said the İP administration must be held accountable for the below par results in the June 24 parliamentary and presidential elections. They also blamed it for "disloyalty" in preparing the deputy lists.
"The administration opted for figures that joined the party later, while founding members were pushed aside," Halaçoğlu told the news conference. He also read a statement on behalf of the resigning trio.
The İP was shaken to its core after Chairwoman Meral Akşener fared worse than the party in the June 24 elections.
The party had already been reeling under a series of resignations across the country in party administration and local administrations. After the elections, scores of party members, including İP Deputy Chairperson Ayfer Yılmaz, and several provincial heads resigned from the party after expressing their discontent with the results.
Failing to manage the unraveling, Akşener called for an extraordinary convention and announced her resignation following the meetings in the central province of Afyonkarahisar late July. The meeting looked to draw a new road map to prevent the party's dissolution.
In the wake of a lengthy process to persuade her, she was nominated as the sole candidate for party chairmanship two weeks ago at the convention.
Özdağ added that İP was unsuccessful in the June 24 parliamentary and presidential elections in terms of its own goals but it is a successful party in terms of objective conditions.
"In seven months, with 10 percent of the total vote, 43 parliamentarians overcame all obstacles and achieved an effective result. The İP will perform better in the local elections than in general election," he said.
After the June 7, 2015 elections, former Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) members Akşener, Özdağ and a number of its other deputies, including Halaçoğlu and Yeniçeri, had called on Chairman Devlet Bahçeli to step down. As they failed to unseat Bahçeli following a heated judicial process, they left the party in 2016 to form their own party, the İP.
