The group around the former AKP politician Ahmet Davutoğlu drove five vehicles to the Turkish Ministry of the Interior to personally submit an application for the admission of a new party. This officially marks the beginning of the party formation of AKP renegades. The new party is expected to be presented in Ankara on Friday.

Former Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu left the AKP in September, preceding an imminent party expulsion. The former Erdoğan confidant had criticized the AKP for abandoning its founding philosophy. Together with Davutoğlu, former AKP General Vice President Selçuk Özdağ, former AKP Istanbul MP Abdullah Basçı and former AKP Sakarya MP Ayhan Sefer Üstün had withdrawn from the party. They, too, thus avoided an internal cleansing by the Erdoğan wing.

Davutoğlu now presents himself as a democratic politician and opposition to the dictator. With the establishment of a new party, he wants to bind the dissatisfied religious-conservative voters of Erdoğan to itself. Erdoğan had consciously ignored Davutoğlu when ending the dialogue process with the Kurdish movement and opened one of the bloodiest chapters in recent Turkish history.

Ahmet Davutoğlu was born in 1959 in Konya and was prime minister and AKP chairman from 2014 to 2016. From 2009 to 2014 he was Turkish Foreign Minister.