Intransigent to the end, the popular republican opposition in the media and everyday life kept questioning before and during the regime change the democratic credentials, nay, the sheer legitimacy, of the ruling Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP), given the allegedly concealed ‘sinister designs’ of this political party that had emerged out of Islamo- nationalism (Millî Görüş). In so doing, the republicans were often teased for the purported anachronism of those ‘prejudices’ by the group of liberal intellectuals who supported the transformation. Accordingly, the republicans had never really ceased hankering after a ‘golden age’ that had lasted just over two decades from 1923 when modern Turkey had been set up, effectively until the advent of the liberal- populist era in the country in 1950, considered by the core republicans as a ‘counter- revolution’ towards aborting and undermining the earlier advances. In the wake of the regime change from 2011, the bitter confrontation between these two groups of ‘white Turks’– the diehard republicans on one side and the formerly pro- government liberals on the other– would prove to be somewhat double- edged. The joke would now appear to have been very much on the over- optimistic liberals, increasingly embarrassed with the suddenly ‘Islamistic’, gauche and clumsy policies of the government. Feeling a betrayal of sorts, most liberal intellectuals would soon become almost more raging than the long- time critics in opposing the AKP rule. More ironically perhaps, the republican ‘wish’ for a return to the earlier era, as mockingly claimed by the former pro- government intellectuals, would seem to have come true in some measure: the promised order under a growing Islamo- nationalist populist sway, to be dubbed ‘the new Turkey’ by the government- sponsored media literati, would appear to be turning more and more into the old Turkey of the single- party rule that had branded the early republican regime.

Only, it was dubious that the oppressive political atmosphere that had marked the early republican era had in fact been this stifling. That the feel in sections of society was now getting palpably heavier compared to the historical period in question was probably to do with three novel factors. (1) Mass media and telecommunication technologies arguably gave the new power holders an unprecedented and increasingly daunting edge.