The 61-year-old Meral Aksener founded the center-right "Iyi Parti," or "Good Party," in Ankara today with a group of legislators who broke away from Turkey's nationalist party this year.
They were angered by the support that party gave Erdogan in a referendum that increases the president's powers.
Aksener is Turkey's first woman interior minister and served at that post between 1996 and 1997 until the government, a conservative-Islamist coalition, was ousted under military pressure.