A century of the Republic: reforms, coups, economic change and the rise of the presidential system, told neutrally and in order.
Last reviewed on 27 September 2026.
This page covers the political history of the Republic of Türkiye (often still called Turkey in English) from its proclamation on 29 October 1923 to the centenary in 2023. It runs from a single-party state built around Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's reforms, through multi-party democracy interrupted by military interventions, to the long period of Justice and Development Party (AKP) government and the executive presidency. Much of this history is still argued over inside Türkiye. Where historians, parties or international observers disagree, the page says who holds which view rather than taking a side. For how the state works today, see Government and politics. For the founder, see Atatürk.
From 1923 to 1946 the Republican People's Party (CHP), founded by Mustafa Kemal, was in practice the only legal party. There were two brief attempts at opposition. The Progressive Republican Party (1924–25) was closed after the Sheikh Said rebellion of 1925, when the government took emergency powers under the Law on the Maintenance of Order. The Free Republican Party of 1930 was dissolved within months after drawing unexpectedly large crowds.
Within this framework the government carried through a sweeping programme of reforms:
The CHP's programme was summed up in 1931 as the "Six Arrows": republicanism, nationalism, populism, statism, secularism and revolutionism (reformism). Statism meant state-led industrialisation after the 1929 crash, with state banks and factories and a first five-year plan in 1934.
Views of this period differ sharply. The official tradition presents the reforms as the creation of a modern, secular nation-state out of a defeated empire. Critics from religious conservatives, Kurdish movements and liberal historians point to their authoritarian imposition, the suppression of religious and ethnic dissent, and events such as the military operations in Dersim (now Tunceli) in 1937–38, in which thousands died. In 2011 Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan called Dersim a massacre and offered an apology on behalf of the state.
Atatürk died on 10 November 1938, and İsmet İnönü, his long-serving prime minister and a commander in the War of Independence, became president. The party named him "National Chief" (Milli Şef). His main achievement was keeping Türkiye out of the Second World War until February 1945, when it declared war on Germany and Japan in order to join the United Nations. The 1942 Wealth Tax (Varlık Vergisi) was assessed far more heavily on non-Muslim citizens, and those unable to pay were sent to labour camps. It is now widely seen as discriminatory.
After 1945, pressure from within the CHP, the post-war alignment with the United States against Soviet claims on the Straits and eastern provinces, led İnönü to allow opposition parties. In January 1946 Celal Bayar, Adnan Menderes, Fuat Köprülü and Refik Koraltan founded the Democrat Party (DP). The CHP won the July 1946 election, which was held with open voting and secret counting and was widely criticised as unfair.
On 14 May 1950 the DP won a landslide. İnönü handed over power peacefully, a rare event in the region at the time. Bayar became president and Menderes prime minister. The DP drew on rural voters and provincial business. It relaxed some religious restrictions, notably restoring the Arabic call to prayer in 1950, and used Marshall Plan aid to mechanise agriculture and build roads. Türkiye sent a brigade to Korea and joined NATO in 1952. The Istanbul riots of 6–7 September 1955 destroyed much Greek, Armenian and Jewish property and hastened the departure of Istanbul's Greek community.
In the later 1950s inflation and debt led to a 1958 devaluation. The government became increasingly intolerant of criticism: it restricted the press, seized CHP assets, and in 1960 set up a parliamentary commission to investigate the opposition. Student protests followed.
On 27 May 1960 a group of officers overthrew the government and formed the National Unity Committee under General Cemal Gürsel. DP leaders were tried on the island of Yassıada. Menderes, Foreign Minister Fatin Rüştü Zorlu and Finance Minister Hasan Polatkan were hanged in September 1961.
The 1961 constitution, approved by referendum, created a Constitutional Court, a Senate, autonomous universities and broad civil liberties, including the right to strike. It also created a National Security Council that gave the military a formal voice in government. Civilian politics resumed with İnönü-led coalitions, and then with the Justice Party (AP) of Süleyman Demirel, widely seen as the DP's heir, which won a majority in 1965. The 1963 Ankara Agreement associated Türkiye with the European Economic Community. By the end of the decade left- and right-wing student movements were clashing violently.
On 12 March 1971 the military high command issued a memorandum demanding a government able to end the unrest. Demirel resigned. Technocratic cabinets ruled under martial law, and constitutional amendments curtailed many of the freedoms granted in 1961. Left-wing activists were tried, and three student leaders, including Deniz Gezmiş, were executed in 1972.
The 1970s were dominated by Bülent Ecevit's CHP and Demirel's AP. Neither could govern alone, and they rotated through fragile coalitions, including the "Nationalist Front" governments that brought in Necmettin Erbakan's Islamist National Salvation Party and Alparslan Türkeş's Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). In July 1974, under Ecevit, Türkiye intervened militarily in Cyprus after a Greek-backed coup on the island. Türkiye calls it a peace operation, while Greek Cypriots and most of the international community describe it as an invasion followed by an occupation. See Northern Cyprus. Economic crisis, with severe shortages and very high inflation by 1979–80, combined with left–right political violence that killed thousands, including the Taksim Square May Day shootings of 1977 and the Maraş killings of Alevis in 1978.
On 12 September 1980 the armed forces under Chief of General Staff Kenan Evren took power. Parliament and all political parties were dissolved, and former leaders were banned from politics. The scale of repression is well documented: hundreds of thousands of people were detained, torture was widespread according to later parliamentary and human-rights investigations, and around fifty people were executed. Supporters of the coup at the time argued that it had saved the country from civil war. Most assessments in Türkiye today, including Evren's conviction in 2014 (he died in 2015 while an appeal was pending), are strongly critical.
The 1982 constitution, approved by referendum on 7 November 1982 by a very large majority in a vote without free campaigning, made Evren president for seven years. It placed restrictions on rights, strengthened the National Security Council, created the Council of Higher Education (YÖK) and, through the accompanying election law, set a 10 per cent national threshold for parties to enter parliament. It is still in force, but it has been amended many times, most substantially in 2001, 2004, 2010 and 2017.
The generals allowed only three parties into the November 1983 election. The winner was Turgut Özal's Motherland Party (ANAP), the one least favoured by the military. Özal had designed the "24 January 1980" stabilisation package. As prime minister (1983–89) and then president (1989–93), he moved Türkiye from an inward-looking, state-led economy to an export-oriented market one: import liberalisation, a convertible lira, the Istanbul Stock Exchange (1986), the first privatisations and a boom in construction and tourism. In 1987 Türkiye applied for full membership of the European Community, and a referendum restored the political rights of pre-1980 leaders such as Demirel and Ecevit. In 1991 a ban on using Kurdish in private settings was lifted. He died in office in April 1993.
The 1990s saw a string of short-lived coalitions, and Tansu Çiller became the first woman prime minister in 1993. The armed conflict with the PKK, which had begun in 1984, reached its peak intensity. Thousands of villages in the south-east were evacuated, and the conflict as a whole has cost tens of thousands of lives. Human-rights organisations documented abuses by security forces, including unsolved killings; the state stressed PKK attacks on civilians and soldiers. The economy suffered a severe crisis in 1994, and chronic high inflation continued.
In the December 1995 election Erbakan's Islamist Welfare Party (Refah) came first. It formed a government with Çiller's True Path Party in 1996. On 28 February 1997 the National Security Council issued decisions against what it called reactionary Islam, and under sustained military pressure Erbakan resigned in June 1997. This intervention is often called the "postmodern coup". Welfare was closed by the Constitutional Court in 1998, and restrictions such as the headscarf ban in universities were enforced strictly.
In 1999 PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan was captured in Kenya and brought to Türkiye. On 17 August the İzmit earthquake killed more than 17,000 people and exposed weak building control (see Earthquakes). In December the EU's Helsinki summit recognised Türkiye as a candidate for membership. A banking and currency crisis in 2000–01 then brought an IMF-backed reform programme.
The Justice and Development Party (AKP), founded in 2001 by reformist members of the Islamist movement including Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Abdullah Gül, won the November 2002 election with about a third of the vote. Because of the 10 per cent threshold, it took nearly two-thirds of the seats. Erdoğan, at first barred from office by a conviction for reciting a poem, became prime minister in March 2003.
The first AKP governments passed extensive EU-oriented reforms: the full abolition of the death penalty, broadcasting and education in Kurdish, and reduced military influence over the National Security Council. EU accession talks opened in 2005 but slowed from 2006 and have been effectively frozen since around 2016–18. The economy grew strongly, and the new Turkish lira of 2005 removed six zeros. In 2007 the military posted an online warning (the "e-memorandum") against Gül's presidential candidacy; the AKP won an early election, Gül became president, and a referendum approved direct presidential elections. In 2008 the Constitutional Court narrowly declined to close the AKP but cut its state funding.
The mass Ergenekon and Balyoz (Sledgehammer) trials of 2008–12 convicted hundreds of officers, journalists and others of coup plotting. Most convictions were later overturned, and the government and much of the public came to blame prosecutors linked to the Gülen movement for fabricating evidence. Relations between the AKP and the movement, once allies, broke down openly after the corruption investigations of December 2013, which the government called an attempted "judicial coup". Earlier in 2013 the Gezi Park protests in Istanbul had spread nationwide. Supporters described them as a civic protest against authoritarianism, while the government described them as an attempt to destabilise the country. A peace process with the PKK ran from 2013 until it collapsed in July 2015.
In August 2014 Erdoğan won the first direct presidential election. In the June 2015 election the AKP lost its majority after the pro-Kurdish HDP crossed the threshold, then regained it in a repeat election that November.
On the night of 15 July 2016 a faction in the armed forces attempted a coup: bombing parliament, blocking the Bosphorus bridges and trying to seize the president. Crowds answered calls to resist, and loyal units defeated the attempt by the next morning. About 250 people were killed on the government side, and many more were injured. The government, and later Turkish courts, attributed the coup to followers of the US-based cleric Fethullah Gülen, whom Türkiye designates as a terrorist organisation (FETÖ). Gülen denied involvement and died in the United States in October 2024. Under a state of emergency that lasted until July 2018, more than 100,000 public employees were dismissed by decree and tens of thousands were arrested. The government called these measures necessary to purge coup plotters from the state. Opposition parties, the EU and human-rights organisations criticised their scale and the lack of due process.
On 16 April 2017 a referendum approved, with about 51 per cent of the vote, constitutional amendments creating an executive presidency. The office of prime minister was abolished, the president gained the power to issue decrees and appoint ministers, and elections were synchronised. The opposition challenged the electoral board's late decision to accept unstamped ballots, and the challenge was rejected. Supporters argued the system would end unstable coalitions. Critics argued it removed checks on executive power. The system came into force with the June 2018 elections. See Government and politics.
A currency crisis hit in 2018, and inflation rose to peak above 80 per cent a year in 2022 on official figures, before a return to orthodox policy from mid-2023 (see Economy). In the 2019 local elections the opposition CHP won Ankara and Istanbul. The Istanbul result was annulled and re-run in June 2019, and Ekrem İmamoğlu won again by a larger margin. In 2020 Hagia Sophia was reconverted from a museum to a mosque, and in 2021 Türkiye withdrew from the Istanbul Convention on violence against women.
On 6 February 2023 two major earthquakes centred in Kahramanmaraş province struck eleven provinces, killing more than 50,000 people in Türkiye on official figures. They renewed debate over building standards and the response to the disaster. In the general elections of 14 May 2023 Erdoğan led a first round against Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the joint candidate of a six-party opposition alliance, and won the run-off on 28 May with about 52 per cent. His People's Alliance kept a parliamentary majority. The OSCE-led international observation mission reported that voters had genuine political alternatives but that the incumbent enjoyed an unjustified advantage, including in media coverage. The Republic marked its centenary on 29 October 2023 (see Republic Day).
Opposition parties were permitted from 1945–46, and the Democrat Party was founded in January 1946. The first multi-party election was held in July 1946, but the decisive moment was 14 May 1950, when the Democrat Party won and the CHP handed over power peacefully.
The armed forces seized power in 1960 and 1980. In 1971 a military memorandum forced the government to resign, and in 1997 military pressure through the National Security Council led to the fall of the Erbakan government. An attempted coup on 15 July 2016 was defeated.
Yes. The constitution drafted after the 1980 coup and approved by referendum on 7 November 1982 remains Türkiye's constitution. It has been amended many times, most significantly in 2001, 2004, 2010 and 2017. The 2017 amendments introduced the executive presidency.
The referendum of 16 April 2017, approved by about 51 per cent of voters, replaced the parliamentary system with an executive presidency. The prime minister's post was abolished, the president gained powers to issue decrees and appoint ministers, and presidential and parliamentary elections were synchronised. It took effect in 2018.
The Turkish government and courts attribute the 15 July 2016 coup attempt to followers of Fethullah Gülen, whose movement Türkiye designates as a terrorist organisation (FETÖ). Gülen, who lived in the United States, denied involvement. The purges that followed were criticised by the EU and rights groups.
The Justice and Development Party won the general election of 3 November 2002 with about a third of the vote, which gave it nearly two-thirds of seats because of the 10 per cent threshold. Abdullah Gül was prime minister first, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan took over in March 2003.