An Emerging Power in the Age of Globalization

Abstract

The period of unstable coalition governments ushered in by the military intervention of the February 28 process came to an end with the general elections held in November 2002. The Justice and Development Party (AKP), formed in 2001, swept the elections to form the first majority government since 1991 when the Turgut Özal era ended. The elections were quite a shock for the ruling parties: Prime Minister Ecevit’s Democratic Left Party entered the elections as the strongest in the parliament and emerged as the fifth, and none of the parties that had formed the ruling coalition could pass the 10 percent electoral threshold and thus enter the parliament. Only two opposition parties, the newly-formed AKP and the CHP, were able to do so. Having obtained 34.28 percent of the votes in its first election experience, the AKP won a clear mandate to form a majority government, and the ardently secularist CHP became the main opposition party. This was the first single-party electoral outcome since Turgut Özal and signaled the dramatic collapse of the militarization period characterized by shaky coalition governments. In a way, the February 28 process, initiated to “refashion Turkey’s political landscape along Kemalist lines,”1drastically altered the course of Turkish political history by unintentionally paving the way for the rise of the AKP to a dominant political position.KeywordsEuropean UnionPrime MinisterForeign PolicyMiddle EastSecurity CouncilThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.