Today in History – 7 January

The Democrat Party is established

As the first of the parties to rise to power through free elections in the history of the Turkish Republic, the Democrat Party was founded on 7 January 1946 and ended the 27 year-long reign of Turkey’s single-party era by winning the elections by a landslide on 14 May 1950.

The cofounders of the Democrat Party included Atatürk’s last and İnönü’s first Prime Minister Celal Bayar, Refik Koraltan, who had served as a member of the Independence Tribunal and the chairman of The Grand National Assembly of Turkey (TBMM), politician and academic Fuad Köprülü, and Adnan Menderes, whose youth had been shaped by the vision of unionist nationalism. Upon severing their ties with CHP (People’s Republican Party) due to the “Memorandum of the Four” they submitted, these four cofounders sought a new political restructuring. The only difference between DP as a splinter party and other subsequent fractions within CHP was that the opposition party DP established had a short-lived rise to power.

Following the elections of 1950, the Democrat Party also won the elections of 1954 and 1957. It was overthrown by the military coup d’état of 27 May 1960 and was as officially suppressed on 29 September 1961. The Democrat Party is also known among the public as “Demirk?rat Partisi,” a name phonetically close to “democrat” and coined by the combination of “demir” (iron) and the legendary Turkish dapple-grey horse “K?rat.”