During the inaugural press conference held on the day of its foundation, the founders declared that the mission of the party was "to protect the rights of the oppressed working class in Turkey" and that "members of the TİP, together with intellectuals, will work for the establishment of social security and will fully recognize and promote the right to strike.
Following the victory of anti-fascist forces in 1945, leftist parties emerged, but were swiftly dismantled within six months under martial law.
Beginning in the mid-1950s, as the terror of the 1951-52 TKP arrests waned, the rise of the Democrat Party (DP) began to stumble, and the VP was limited to Hikmet Kıvılcımlı's inner circle, a number of leftist intellectuals and labour leaders, independently of each other, took it upon themselves to investigate the feasibility of establishing a leftist political party.
In this respect, the TİP was the product of various organizational experiments and independent searches throughout the 1950s, with the contribution of the favorable political environment provided by the events of May 27th and the new constitution.
In 1962, they invited constitutional lawyer Mehmet Ali Aybar to assume the leadership of the party, who accepted the offer.
[1] Following Aybar, several intellectuals like Çetin Altan, Aziz Nesin and Yaşar Kemal also joined the ranks and the party soon adopted a left-wing nationalist and socialist program.
[1] TİP deputies' highly publicized active participation in parliamentary sessions contributed to a radicalisation of the political scene in the country.
[6] During its Party Congress in October 1970, it recognized existence of the Kurdish community in eastern part of the country which had to affront policies of forced assimilation.