Meet Turkey’s 165th active political party.
Yeni Yol (New Path) will be significant, at least in parliament, because it involves the merger of three existing parties which are crowded into the same ideological space.
For now, Deva, Gelecek and Saadet ride together.
Of the current 164 parties, 15 have MPs. Five of those claim to represent pious Sunnis, a base that probably doesn’t account for more than 10% of the electorate.
The biggest of the lot is clearly Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s AK Party, Turkey’s most successful religious party ever.
Erdoğan’s party of course appeals to a far wider spectrum of voters, but its origin was in the religious Milli Görüş movement.
And it is this movement that has fractured in recent years – because of a view that AK has strayed too far from its roots.
There’s another reason why there are four other parties today claiming to wave the Milli Görüş flag: succession.
Before the 2023 election they were all positioning themselves to assume the mantle in a post-Erdoğan era – which never materialised because he won re-election.
Of the three that are merging, Gelecek is led by a former PM and Deva by a well-regarded ex-economy minister. Deva in particular was once regarded a possible replacement for AK to unite the centre-right.
It never happened, despite implicit backing from ex-president Abdullah Gül.
The final part of the trio is the oldest, Saadet. It was founded by Necmettin Erbakan, a former PM and father of the Milli Görüş movement who was one a byword for Turkish religious politics.
More about that family in a moment.
All three parties are, to be blunt, minor. They have limited public name recognition. They always appear in opinion polls in low single figures. As the oldest, Saadet has a wider grassroots network – but the fact is they have MPs only because of a pact with the opposition CHP.
A merger has two clear benefits.
First, they can comfortably wield more than 20 MPs – large enough to form a group in parliament and be represented on the few committees and agencies where Turkey’s executive presidency system does still allow MPs to wield some influence.
Second, it helps end squabbling over a relatively small pool of voters. Right now the Yeni Yol party is a vehicle for parliamentary clout, but it sets the groundwork to build a possible electoral force.
But it will have its work cut out because of the final party of this tale.
On paper, Yeniden Refah – led by Erbakan’s son Fatih – is the smallest of the lot with just four MPs. Yeni Yol will have around 25; AK has 100s.
But Erbakan’s brought a sense of dynamism that Turkish religious politics hasn’t seen since, well, Erdoğan himself in the late 1990s.
Erbakan’s YRP won its seats largely on its own steam – impressive in Turkey’s electoral system, which favours larger parties (the Yeni Yol lot all ran on CHP lists, a far safer bet).
YRP impressed even further in last year’s local election by clinching key cities like Şanlıurfa.
The party has clear public name recognition and boasts more than half a million members – more than Deva, Gelecek and Saadet combined – and has now positioned itself as a “third way” in Turkish politics, aligned neither with AK nor the traditional opposition.
It’s a long way to the next election, but right now it is Erbakan who is on the rise.
Turkish politics has a history of party mergers being waved through long after the parties themselves lost resonance with voters.
The challenge for Yeni Yol is to prove it is not one of them.
