Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) Chairperson Devlet Bahçeli called on the Good Party (IP) to forge an alliance ahead of Turkey’s upcoming municipal elections next year.
“We called on you to return home but you didn’t so let us become neighbors at the municipal level for the benefit of our country,” Bahçeli said was quoted as saying by Ismail Özdemir, the deputy-head of his party’s public relations office in a message broadcast on CNN Turk on Thursday.
Özdemir noted that Bahçeli made similar appeals in the past, calling on former MHP members who transferred to IP to return to the MHP.
The IP is an offshoot of the MHP, formed when a group of party members split from the party due to Bahçeli’s cooperation with the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party). Having failed to dislodge Bahçeli in a heated judicial process, MHP dissidents left the party in 2016 and established the IP under Meral Akşener’s leadership in October 2017.
Much like its parent party, the IP had a nationalist stance, yet drifted away from its initial raison d’etre by cooperating with the center left-secular main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP).
An IP member close to the party’s Chairwoman Meral Akşener earlier on Thursday said the party was neither searching for nor offering an alliance at the moment, effectively confirming rumors that the parties will be fielding separate and rival candidates and complicating the odds of the CHP retaining key municipalities.
Pundits have said the split was Akşener’s way of being “cautious.”
Turkey will hold municipal elections in March 2024.
