ABSTRACT
If one of the most interesting characteristics of the Thrkish party system in the 1990s was the rapid rise of political Islam under the banner of the Welfare Party (RP), an equally, perhaps, even more, noteworthy development in the early 2000s is its transformation under the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkmma Partisi, AKP) leadership into a moderate conservative democratic party. The AKP won the 3 November 2002 parliamentary elections with 34.3 per cent of the vote and almost twothirds (363) of the assembly seats. Various aspects of this transformation will be the central focus of this essay. In the first section dealing with recent party history, the AKP will be studied in the context of the earlier Islamist parties, since the AKP itself is a very new party (established on 14 August 2001) and only such comparison can give an idea of the extent of this transformation. In the second section, party values and programme will be examined in greater detail, especially in comparison with those of the previous Islamist parties. It will be argued that the AKP has less in common with
them than with the mainstream centre-right parties in Thrkey. In the following section on party organization, again some comparisons will be made with the predecessor parties. In the section on competitive strategy and campaigo tactics, the emphasis will be on the AKP's dilemma between maintaining the loyalty of its religious-conservative voters and keeping its appeal to a much broader centre-right sector of the Turkish electorate.
