Motherland Party (Turkey)

The Motherland Party, (Turkish: Anavatan Partisi, abbreviated as ANAVATAN (formerly ANAP) is a political party in Turkey. It was founded in 1983 by Turgut Özal. It was merged to Democratic Party in October 2009. In September 2011, the party was re-established. Its president is İbrahim Çelebi.

The ANAP was considered a centre-right neoliberal party which supported restrictions on the role that government can play in the economy, which favored private capital and enterprise, and which allowed for some public expressions of religion. In 1983 the elections were won by a new political organization the motherland party, led by Turgut Ozal. Although the motherland party was composed of a potentially disruptive mixture of Islamic revivalist and secular liberals, Ozal was able to form a majority government, and for the time being democracy was restored and politics was back in the hands of the people

History

In the National Assembly elections on 6 November 1983, the Populist Party and the Motherland party were allowed to run for office. The ANAP won 212 of the 450 available seats and Turgut Özal, the leader of the party, became the Prime Minister. The ANAP maintained a majority in the government of Turkey from 1983 until 1991. Turgut Özal held the position of Prime Minister from 1983 to 1989, then President from 1989 to 1993. Ozal died in office, and was succeeded by the True Path Party leader, Suleyman Demirel.

Turkish language

Turkish ( Türkçe ), also referred to as Istanbul Turkish, is the most widely spoken of the Turkic languages, with around 10–15 million native speakers in Southeast Europe (mostly in East Thrace) and 60-65 million native speakers in Western Asia (mostly in Anatolia). Outside of Turkey, smaller groups of speakers exist in Germany, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Northern Cyprus (although a partially recognized state), Greece, the Caucasus, and other parts of Europe and Central Asia.

To the west, the influence of Ottoman Turkish—the variety of the Turkish language that was used as the administrative and literary language of the Ottoman Empire—spread as the Ottoman Empire expanded. In 1928, as one of Atatürk's Reforms in the early years of the Republic of Turkey, the Ottoman Turkish alphabet was replaced with a Latin script.

The distinctive characteristics of Turkish are vowel harmony and extensive agglutination. The basic word order of Turkish is subject–object–verb. Turkish has no noun classes or grammatical gender. Turkish has a strong T–V distinction and usage of honorifics. Turkish uses second-person pronouns that distinguish varying levels of politeness, social distance, age, courtesy or familiarity toward the addressee. The plural second-person pronoun and verb forms are used referring to a single person out of respect.