From Military Rule to Civilian Politics

This chapter examines politics in Turkey during the two decades following the 1980 military coup. These two decades are important because they set the framework within which the secular elites yielded power to the Islamic-rooted elites after the turn of the century. We argue that the choices secular elites made in the decades after the military coup precipitated their own demise and set the stage for the rise of an alternative Islamic elite. The attempt by the military to engineer a docile society ruled by a strong state backfired. During these years Islamists, Kurds, and women made challenging demands for democratization. Even though the generals aimed to create a tabula rasa in the political realm, banning all the existing political parties for some time and controlling the formation of new parties, the new political regime merely led to the fragmentation of the party system and the gradual decline of secular parties.