ABSTRACT
The 3 November 2002 general elections yielded unusual results for Turkish
politics. While the Felicity Party (Saadet Partisi-FP), which represented the National Outlook Movement (NOM) and was regarded as having strongly
Islamist views made a very poor showing (2.5 % of the total votes), the
Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi-JDP), a year-old
breakaway party1 and which was considered conservative or moderately
Islamist, received 34.3 % and earned 363 of a possible 550 seats in the par-
liament.2 Coming in the wake of the so-called 28 February process during
which the public faces of Islam were exposed to the most severe repressive
measures by the civil-military state elites, the weak electoral performance of the FP prompts the following two observations:
1 Turkish voters tend to adopt religious identity as a social common
denominator and therefore distance themselves from political Islam;
2 In so doing, they do not reject the fact that Islam has a public face, but
rather prefer that it asserts itself at the individual and social levels, rather
than in the political realm.
