CONTEMPORARY EURASIA VOLUME VII (1, 2) Contemporary-Eurasia-3new | Page 51

HRANUSH DERMOYAN
not done without a reason and was meant to strengthen the levers of the
military because fi rstly since 1960 all the presidents have been from the
military and secondly with the new constitution for the coming 7 years
the president was supposed to be the head of the NSC.
Despite the military’s eff orts to control the rise of religious sentiments
in the country it was not successful. Necmettin Erbakan’s Islamist Wel-
fare party gained signifi cant prominence in the 1990s which had an im-
pact on the established civil-military relations in the country. During the
1995 elections the Welfare Party gained a signifi cant percentage of votes
and managed to form a coalition government. Erbakan targeted not only
the military tutelage but also the western secular ideology. Such actions, of
course, would not be tolerated by the military. What followed was the so-
called “post-modern coup”. During a National Security Council meeting
in February 1997 the NSC issued a decision which furthered the demand
of the Prime Minister’s resignation. This was the end of Erbakan’s coa-
lition government. By some authors this is considered to be the last suc-
cessful military intervention in Turkish history. The younger generation
of Islamists learned lessons from the mistakes of politicians like Erbakan.
After founding his Justice and Development Party (AKP) rather than con-
fronting the military Recep Erdogan sought ways to drive the military into
an institutional exclusion. He presented himself and his party as pro-EU
and pro-Westernization and thus sugar coated his negative Islamist im-
age. Erdogan managed to convince the civil society in his democratization
agenda which gradually pushed the military out of politics. Although con-
tested, it can be argued that the last successful military intervention took
place in 2007. This time the military made a statement on their website re-
garding the presidential elections of 2007. The candidate who would most
likely be elected was pro-Islamist Abdullah Gul won. The statement of the
military articulated concerns arguing, that the election of Gul as president
was against the secularist ideas of Turkey (BBC). As a result, Gul was not
elected during the fi rst voting. The coup is called e-memorandum as the
military’s statement was exclusively published on their website. As the
older generation of pro-Islamist politicians was defeated by the military,
representatives of the younger generation, such as Recep Tayyip Erdogan
drew lessons from the failure of their predecessors. 30
After 2002 Erdogan has won every local and national election and
in 2010 he secured a victory on the constitutional referendum. A major
step taken towards curbing the infl uence of the military was the abolish-
ment of immunity for generals. Another major change foresaw trials of
30
Koray Caliskan, “Explaining the end of military tutelary regime and the July 15 coup attempt
in Turkey,” Journal of Cultural Economy 10, no. 1, (2017): 98.
51