ABSTRACT
During the 1980s Turkey had witnessed a gradual return to something like the form of party politics which had prevailed before the military coup of 1980. The power of the presidency declined and the political parties reformed. The reversion to a broad two-party structure had been obstructed by the existence of the ruling Motherland Party (MP) which effectively divided the centre right vote with the True Path Party (TPP) of Süleyman Demirel and by the divisions of the left centre parties. Although the Turkish political system moved nearer to the older two-party system during the first half of the 1990s, it by no means completed the evolution and in some important respects moved away from the old system. In particular the power of the Atatürk ideology of a neutral state supported by a non-political bureaucracy and army declined still further and politics invaded more areas of life.
