The Good Party (IP) of Türkiye’s opposition cannot seem to shake out of its downhill path as it loses another parliamentary seat.
Ümit Özlale on Thursday announced his resignation in a terse statement on X, joining over a dozen of his colleagues who departed the party following its poor performance in the March 31 municipal elections.
Özlale initially quit the party in April this year, a week after the local vote, but returned only 19 days later when IP members replaced Chair Meral Akşener with Müsavat Dervişoğlu.
With his resignation, the party’s number of seats in Parliament fell to 30.
The party has also lost some 100,000 members since January as several local branches of the party resigned en masse upon failure at general and municipal elections. Currently, the party has about 400,000 members.
The IP had secured 44 seats in the 2023 legislative elections. Those were accompanied by a general election, in which it endorsed Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the candidate of the six-party opposition alliance against incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
After Erdoğan won a runoff, Akşener faced mounting criticism, which worsened after the disastrous results in the March 31 municipal elections.
Dervişoğlu, who took over the party's chair in May, admitted in July that more people may leave the party. “There may be new resignations, and I can ask those not fulfilling their responsibilities to step down,” he said.
Koray Aydın, one of the party's founders and a stalwart in Turkish nationalist circles for decades, was one of the last prominent names to quit the party in late June.
In the municipal elections, the IP, which secured only 3.77% of the vote, trailed behind the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), whose former members include Akşener, Aydın and Dervişoğlu, among many others.
“It is no bed of roses for the IP,” Dervişoğlu acknowledged.
“But I won’t beg anyone who intends to leave,” he added.
The IP thrived on the votes of former supporters of the MHP who were disillusioned with the latter’s alliance with the Justice and Development Party (AK Party). Another group split from the MHP founded the far-right Victory Party (ZP), but it fared worse than the IP in municipal elections.
The party aspires to regain the trust of supporters disappointed with defeat in local elections. Yet, the results showed that the only path to success is through an alliance with other parties, which will be figured out in the next general elections in 2028.
