Turkish Islamist party rose fastest among urban migrant poor

Evidence

In the March 1994 local elections, the fundamentalist Welfare Party, alone among the five major parties, increased its share of the vote, receiving roughly 19 percent of the votes as compared with 21 percent for Prime Minister Ciller’s True Path Party and 20 percent for the late Özal’s Motherland Party. The Welfare Party captured control of Turkey’s two principal cities, Istanbul and Ankara, and ran extremely strong in the southeastern part of the country. In the December 1995 elections the Welfare Party won more votes and seats in parliament than any other party and six months later took over the government in coalition with one of the secular parties. As in other countries, support for the fundamentalists came from the young, returned migrants, the “downtrodden and dispossessed,” and “new urban migrants, the ‘sans culottes’ of the big cities.” — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 402

Categorization

• XREF: The constituency profile of newly urbanized migrants supporting fundamentalism parallels the base of populist/religious movements in other developing nations, and echoes the displaced-peasant dynamics discussed in this book’s other civilizational-conflict chapters.