MHP

The Nationalist Movement (MHP) is a Turkish far-right political party. The party is also informally known as the Grey Wolves, referring to its unofficial paramilitary youth wing. In the June 2015 general elections, the party polled 16.3% and won 80 seats, becoming the joint third largest political party in the parliament alongside the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP). In 1965, nationalist politician and ex-Colonel Alparslan Türkeş, who had trained in the USA for NATO and founder of the Turkish Gladio Special Warfare Department, gained control of the conservative rural Republican Villagers Nation Party. During an Extraordinary Great Congress held at Adana in Turkey on 8–9 February 1969, Türkeş changed the name of the party to the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). The MHP embraced Turkish nationalism, and under the leadership of Türkeş, militias connected to the party were responsible for assassinating numerous left-wing intellectuals and academics, including some Kurds, during the 1970s. When the Turkish army seized power on September 12, 1980, in a violent coup d'état led by General Kenan Evren, the party was banned, along with all other active political parties at the time, and many of its leading members were imprisoned. Many party members joined the neoliberal Anavatan Partisi or various Islamist parties. Party member (Agâh Oktay Güner) noted that the party's ideology was in power while its members were in prison. The party later was reformed in 1983 under the name "Conservative Party" (Turkish: Muhafazakar Parti). After 1985, however, the name was changed to the "Nationalist Task Party" (Turkish: Milliyetçi Çalışma Partisi) then back again to its former name in 1992. In 1993, Muhsin Yazıcıoğlu and five other deputies separated and founded the Great Union Party. Since the 1990s it has, under the leadership of Devlet Bahçeli, gradually moderated its programme, turning from ethnic to cultural nationalism and conservatism and stressing the unitary nature of the Turkish state. MHP's mainstream overture has strongly increased its appeal to voters and it has grown to the country's third-strongest party, continuously represented in the National Assembly since 2007 with voter shares well above the 10% threshold. The party is headed by Devlet Bahçeli and has 52 deputies, three of them women, in the Grand National Assembly.