As the party heads towards an emergency convention after a brief crisis in leadership, three prominent deputies from the İYİ (Good) Party have decided to resign, stating that the party has lost its ability to become the hope for Turkey’s future, the T24 news website reported on Monday.
Nevzat Bor, Özcan Yeniçeri and Yusuf Halaçoğlu, who were among the founders of the party, had previously resigned from the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) over MHP leader Devlet Bahçeli’s insistence on remaining chairman.
In a statement they said İYİ Party leader Meral Akşener started her campaign for the parliamentary and presidential elections on June 24 with an expectation of challenging President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan; however, she failed to even approach his numbers, garnering only 7.26 percent of the vote.
They also claimed that the party’s real support should be around 17.5 percent, while in the general election the İYİ Party received just below 10 percent.
Halaçoğlu also told T24 they had observed authoritarian leadership in the İYİ Party, too.
“We were thinking that she would prefer the country’s interests over her own, but apparently that was a mistake,” Halaçoğlu said, adding that their colleagues also found serving as a deputy in parliament sufficient for themselves.
Before the elections, the İYİ Party formed an alliance with the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) and the Felicity Party (SP) as these two parties also had their own presidential candidates.
The three politicians who resigned claimed that Akşener had decided to form the alliance without consulting the party’s executive board.
Akşener previously announced that she was resigning as chairman due to the failure in the elections, but party officials convinced her to attend an executive meeting at party headquarters to announce the emergency convention, which will be held on Aug. 12.
She has made some public speeches since then without explicitly confirming that she would be a candidate for leadership again at the convention, although party officials said she would be their sole nominee for the position.
Party’s spokesperson Aytun Çırağ responded to the resignations, saying their description of party management did not fit with the picture he had observed in the party’s latest well-attended meeting to evaluate the election results.
