The Good Party (IP) is gearing up for its extraordinary convention on Saturday, where it will elect its next chair. The nationalist party, founded by former members of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) in 2017, failed to garner widespread support from nationalist voters, as election results showed. Its chair, Meral Akşener, was criticized for rejecting alliances with other opposition parties.
Akşener, a former interior minister, announced a week after local elections on March 31 that she would not run for the post of chairperson. Party stalwarts Koray Aydın, Müsavat Dervişoğlu and Tolga Akalın will compete for the chair at the convention in the capital, Ankara. The party officials said no spectators would be allowed into the venue, unlike at other parties' conventions.
As she announced her intent to leave her post earlier this month, Akşener said in a statement that she would not shy away from taking responsibility for paying the price when necessary.
In the local elections, the IP won around 3.7% of the vote across Türkiye, right behind the MHP. The IP was only a few points ahead of the Victory Party (ZP), another party founded by former MHP members. In the last presidential election, the candidate it endorsed lost. Akşener'ss decision echoes the Republican People's Party's (CHP) tumultuous post-election period after its leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu lost to incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in the presidential election of 2023. The CHP held an extraordinary intraparty election last November, something that cost Kılıçdaroğlu his seat. Like Kılıçdaroğlu, whom she once endorsed, Akşener's political fate depended on the election results. She was already under fire by her dissidents within the party for her insistence on fielding the party's candidates instead of supporting stronger contenders from other parties, namely, the CHP.
The IP has been grappling with back-to-back scandals, including infighting since the six-party opposition bloc lost to the People's Alliance in presidential and parliamentary elections. The chaos worsened after Akşener pulled her party out of the alliance, blaming the CHP for the party's poor showing in legislative polls, and officially rejected the CHP's offer to team up again for the mayoral vote.
Akşener and her close circle's insistence on competing alone has been pushing deputies, including founding members, away in droves, who believed that the IP had very little chance to haul in any significant constituencies by itself and instead endorse the CHP's Istanbul and Ankara Mayors Ekrem Imamoğlu and Mansur Yavaş, two former favorites of Akşener, something they correctly predicted.
Birol Aydemir, the party's chair for research and data management, joined others in resigning. On Thursday, Aydemir said he parted ways with the part "whose institutional structure collapsed because of certain people's self-interest."
"The Good Party cannot escape its current deadlock with those candidates. It is not about who will be the next chair, it should be about how the party can transform itself into a party that can embrace the whole nation and instill hope. I see it is way off that goal," he said.