The Republican People’s Party (CHP), the anti-communist and Turkish-nationalist party at the foundation of the republic, was pushed to the center left in the mid-1960s by a growing body of social movements — students, Kurds, and increasingly peasants and workers. At the height of revolutionary fervor and a growing fascist countermobilization, the party appeared to shift further to the left by the end of the 1970s. But in 1980 a coup with a right-wing reinterpretation of the republic’s founder Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s principles decimated the Left and initiated neoliberal change.

The CHP was banned under the military-technocratic order established in 1980. Its offshoot the Social Democratic Populist Party (SHP) shifted back to the center left, starting to neoliberalize under the influence of not only the coup but also its counterparts in Europe’s social democratic and socialist parties. Nevertheless, it still coalesced with the Kurds until the beginning of the 1990s, campaigning favorably for their cause, winning ample Kurdish support, and featuring leaders of the Kurdish movement as parliamentarians. Yet the intensifying war in Kurdistan led to a backlash from the military and bureaucratic establishment, which the party was unable to handle. Indeed, this establishment had remained core to the CHP-SHP’s organizational and ideological structure even during its left-wing turn from the 1960s to the early 1990s. The SHP collapsed and was reborn under a reactionary leadership. Reopening under its original name, CHP, in 1992, the party shifted further to the right, definitively losing most Kurds.