1960. It wasn't just that the AKP had deeper social networks, especially in municipalities run by its EFTA_R1_00024236 EFTA01737606 predecessor, the Welfare Party. It had also taken control of large parts of the bureaucracy and the police. Meanwhile, the military's status within Turkish society was at an all-

ss they weren't part of. It was the resulting milieu of resentment, says Balci, that gave strength to early Islamist political movements, including the Welfare Party, the party Erdogan once belonged to. (Back in the late 1990s, Erdogan was thrown in jail for publically reciting a poem that read, in part, "the m