ABSTRACT
On 16 April 2017, the Turkish people voted by a marginal majority to change the political regime. Key to the outcome was the electoral coalition between the governing AKP (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi, Justice and Development Party) and the far right MHP (Milliyetci Hareket Partisi, Nationalist Action Party). The simultaneous elections to parliament, which holds weaker powers, brought a comfortable majority for the AKP-MHP coalition. With one-third of the vote, the AKP won over two-thirds of parliamentary seats, forming the first single-party government for over a decade. However, the AKP’s rise to power just a few years later coincided with a new phase: that of the war in Iraq and a related American strategy in the Middle East which was heavily engaged in the promotion of democracy in the Muslim world. This presented the AKP as a potential model to prove the compatibility of liberal democracy with Islam.
