Abstract
The Nationalist Action Party (NAP) finished second in the April 1999 Turkish parliamentary elections, with 18 per cent of the total vote. The NAP's unprecedented success came as a surprise to Turkish political life. Even the top leaders of the NAP had not anticipated such a resounding success, at least a 100 per cent increase in performance over the previous elections of 1995. This electoral success led many experts to comment that Turkish politics is shifting to nationalist radicalism. This triumph of the NAP, however, in our view, is a product of the events of Turkish political life since 1997. Over this short period of time, Turkey's political system has witnessed a broad set of extraordinary events that have brought a new power configuration to the forefront. This new political atmosphere validated the NAP's ideological compromise between conflicting demands of nationalist, Islamist and secularist positions in the Turkish political system.
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