Political parties provide a crucial link between the electorate and the elites as well as between citizens and government in functioning democracies. For over a century, political parties have played this role in the evolution of the Turkish political system under the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic. During this time, Islamist political parties and interest groups (such as tarikat—religious orders) played important role in this process.

Political parties in Turkey have served crucial functions identified by Samuel Eldersveld, Robert Michels, and Elmer Schattschneider. Party adaptation has occurred at different times through dynamic and abrupt processes. Since the beginning of multi-party politics in 1946, the Turkish

political system has experienced a turbulent history, ridden with ideological polarization and factionalization of political parties and interest groups, periods of social and political unrest, and four military interventions in 1960, 1971, 1980, and 1997. The first and third of these interventions were the most serious as the officers completely changed the constitutional order of the country in an attempt to end socio-economic and political crises. By contrast, the 1971 intervention only resulted in some revisions of the Constitution. The final intervention, known in Turkish media and scholarly circles as a “soft coup,” involved pressure

from the military to force the resignation of the Prime Minister. Thus, it is fair to say that with each intervention, the armed forces attempted to reestablish a reformed political order where liberal representative democracy

could flourish. However, their efforts have been debated as each successive post-coup period brought new challenges and problems to the Turkish political system. The permanent closure of the Virtue Party (Fazilet Partisi—FP) by the Constitutional Court on June 22, 2001, is the most recent episode in Turkey’s religious parties’ ongoing struggle to find themselves a place in Turkish politics. The former State Prosecutor, Vural Savaș, filed a case with the court on May 11, 1999, asking that the FP be closed on the grounds that it had become a center of anti-secular activists

and that it was a mere continuation of the previously closed Welfare Party (Refah Partisi—RP). In its ruling, the court sided with the prosecutor on the first point, but did not rule that FP was a continuation of the RP.

If we consider that the Turkish secular institutions, led by the military, repeatedly closed Islamist political parties during Turkey’s republican history and that each closure has been followed by the formation of a new Islamist political party staffed almost exclusively by the same political

elite, it becomes quite apparent that this political force is not going to disappear from the Turkish political scene any time soon. This in itself is a remarkable success and highlights the determination of the Islamist political elite to play a significant role in the country’s political life. What

could explain this success of the Islamist political parties in Turkey? To what extent have religiously-oriented parties become system-oriented and thus contributed to the consolidation of democracy in Turkey? A look at the leadership, organizational strategies, and tactics of the Islamist parties can help in this regard.