What dies, and what is born, within a party?

We remember it from biology class: when a cell divides, there is no death involved. The nucleus splits in two, the cytoplasm is shared, and two new cells replace the old one. But not every division is healthy. Sometimes division is the organism’s growth and multiplication; sometimes it is the outward expression of damage accumulated in the DNA, of a tension that has become too heavy to carry any longer. Viewed from outside, the two look the same: a cell has split in two. But understanding whether what is happening inside is a healthy multiplication or an uncontrolled rupture requires a far deeper gaze.

Turkish politics witnessed exactly such a moment last week. From a party 103 years old, 91 members of parliament resigned in a single night; the wave of resignations, which began through the e-Government portal, ended by morning with the founding petition of a new party. As history would have it, this petition was delivered to the Ministry of Interior on a day coinciding with the 103rd anniversary of the Treaty of Lausanne; the Founders’ Board convened at a club founded in 1926, whose first honorary chairman was a figure from the Republic’s earliest days. A symbolic language was carefully constructed: the old badge was removed, a new one pinned in its place, with the portrait of a founding leader in the background and a sentence reminding whom sovereignty belongs to. No detail was accidental; each was a quiet signature on the claim: “We are not without roots — we are the ones carrying the true legacy.”

So why does a political movement split? This question must be approached not merely as a current crisis but as a recurring pattern in human history. A fourteenth-century thinker, Ibn Khaldun, explained the rise of states and communities through a concept he called “asabiyyah”: the sense of solidarity that holds a group together, uniting it around a common purpose. According to Khaldun, this solidarity lives at its strongest in founding generations who struggle together before yet holding power. Once power is attained, a strange reversal begins: comfort, office and status replace the struggle; the second and third generations no longer feel the same fire as the founding generation. As asabiyyah weakens, intra-group rivalry strengthens, shared purpose gives way to personal calculation, and the community begins to dissolve from within, without any outside blow.

Viewed through this lens, a century-old party cracking is in fact not surprising at all; what is truly surprising is that it managed to preserve its unity for this long. Yet Ibn Khaldun’s theory tells us why division happens, not how. For that we must turn to another figure writing at the start of the twentieth century, Max Weber. Weber says authority has three sources: tradition, rules, and charisma. Rule-based authority operates through a court ruling or a bylaw article; charisma-based authority exists through a leader’s personal pull over the masses, through the voluntary loyalty of their followers. Weber’s most striking observation is this: these two forms of authority cannot coexist peacefully under the same roof for long. Institutional rules can remove a leader from office; but the loyalty living in the hearts of those who follow that leader cannot be erased with a single signature. It is exactly at this point that legal validity and emotional legitimacy diverge, and the community is forced to choose which one to remain loyal to.

Behind last week’s rupture lay exactly this tension: a leader removed from office by a court ruling, then regrouped under a new roof by members of parliament, and the cadre following him. Some will read this as the inevitable clash of rules and charisma, others merely as personal ambition destroying institutional discipline. Both readings are incomplete, because both reduce the matter to a single side. In fact, such ruptures most often arise from the moment when two different understandings of legitimacy can no longer breathe together under the same roof — what matters is not who is right, but which legitimacy comes across as more persuasive to which segment.

So what is the result? Here too we must return to the cell metaphor. If a division is healthy, two living structures emerge: each performs its own function, and the organism as a whole grows stronger. In politics, this can mean an unmet need being addressed, a different discourse reaching a new bloc of voters. But if the division is unhealthy, both resulting structures remain incomplete: one lacking roots, the other lacking a cadre; neither can carry, alone, the strength the old whole once carried. This is not the first time Turkish political history has faced this dilemma. In 1946 too, a cadre splitting from the same party founded a new roof under the claim “we are the true representatives of democracy,” and that rupture redrew the country’s political map for decades. History does not repeat exactly, but patterns do — and each repetition becomes an opportunity if we have learned the previous one’s lesson, or merely a new disappointment if we have not.

The question facing the reader is not “which side is right?” — that is a question time and the voters will answer anyway. The real question is: is the newly founded structure merely inheriting the old one’s symbols, or is it genuinely able to rebuild its own asabiyyah — its own shared purpose, its own solidarity? Because a portrait, a badge, a chosen historic date can borrow legitimacy but cannot produce it. Legitimacy is woven anew, patiently, only around a shared purpose.

Perhaps the real issue in these lands is not how many times parties will split, but whether the structure founded after each split will settle for imitating the founding fire, or not. That is the question that must be asked, and its answer will take shape, in the coming months, in the political memory of whoever is reading these lines.

This article was first published on 1 August 2026 in Bursa Hakimiyet.