Turkey adopted a multiparty system in 1946; before this, elections were held according to the principle of “open ballot, secret counting.” In the 1950 elections, the Democrat Party (DP) won 53.3 percent of the vote and 416 seats in Parliament, while the Republican People's Party (CHP) won 39.9 percent of the vote and 69 seats in Parliament. The DP's votes did not come solely from a homogenous section of society, but rather included the votes of Sunnis, Alevis, Turks, Kurds, villagers, townsmen, religious people, semi-religious people, people who prayed five times a day and people who didn't. All these groups came together under the DP's banner.In 1954 the DP increased its votes, winning a total of 505 seats in Parliament while the CHP won only 31 seats in Parliament. In the 1957 elections, the DP won 424 seats in Parliament while the CHP won 178 seats. In 1960 a coup d'état was staged on May 27.
The post-coup elections held in 1961 were very interesting because the CHP won 173 seats in Parliament and became the interim ruling party. In the 1965 elections, the Justice Party (AP), the DP's successor, won 53 percent of the vote and 240 seats in Parliament while the CHP won 134 seats. In the 1969 elections, the AP won 256 seats, and the CHP won 143 seats.
The CHP became the majority party for the first time in the multiparty system in the 1973 elections, winning 33 percent of the vote and 185 seats in Parliament. This was the Bülent Ecevit period. There were three important factors that made Ecevit and the CHP the leading party:
a) The removal of the second president of the Republic of Turkey, İsmet İnönü, from the political scene. This was fairly important because it was the removal of a single-party system icon.
b) The CHP's opposition of the March military memorandum, with Ecevit calling it “an attack against myself and democracy.” These words showed Ecevit was against military intervention in politics.
c) The impression during this period that Ecevit was a man of the “people,” earning him the nickname “Karaoğlan” after a heroic soldier cartoon character.
The periphery, or the centrifugal powers that came together in the 1950, 1954, 1965 and 1969 elections, gathered around Ecevit in 1973. They then gathered around Turgut Özal in 1983. The biggest reason for this was the push by Kenan Evren, the powerful general who plotted the Sept. 12, 1980 coup, to elect another general, Turgut Sunalp, in the elections. But to Evren's dismay the public voted for Özal, bringing his Motherland Party (then ANAP, now ANAVATAN) into ruling power.
The 1995 elections are another political process that should be analyzed within this frame. The Welfare Party (RP), led by Necmettin Erbakan, whose political parties have been dissolved several times by the military, won 21.8 percent of the vote and became the leading party. Then finally, the same periphery forces brought Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's Justice and Development Party (AK Party) into power on Nov. 3, 2002 and again on July 22, 2007.
In short, during every period, the periphery makes a democratic attack on the central, and they bring into power whoever the military and bureaucracy oppose. This is the real story of politics in Turkey. Surely during this period, the central power does not just stand there idle, but stages operations to set back the periphery. In this model, which we can describe as the “Turkey Model,” there is a tide between the central and the centrifugal powers, or more precisely, there is a tide between the “bureaucratic central” and the “societal central.”
The problem is the same across the Muslim world. Muslim populations are increasing in major cities. Literacy rates are increasing, and better relations are being formed between the East and West owing to communication, transportation, education, the economy, trade and tourism. Technology and globalization make this inevitable.
If you ask anyone, from Morocco to Indonesia, what the one thing they want is, their response will be “political representation, democratic participation, freedom of religion and conscience, freedom of speech, the right to association, the rule of law, better health care and more education and city services.” Large crowds have innocent and legitimate demands. The problem, however, is the military-civil bureaucracy, the huge capital of people that have used state resources to become rich and universities guarding this ideology -- in other words the state center isn't meeting these demands.
