126Abstract. The Pro-Islamic Justice and Development Party (AKP), which has been ruling in Turkey since 2002, represents the interests of a significant part of the Turkish society that has long been in implicit opposition to secular reforms of the Republican period. Thus, when the AKP came to power, there was a moment of revenge for the conservative part of society and a certain weakening of the secular Republicans’ position. But the division of the Turkish society into two roughly equal groups creates not so much a balance of stability – it rather keeps the possibility of a reverse transition of power to more secular political forces. However, the AKP’s period of rule has lasted for almost 20 years. Therefore, it can be assumed that the phenomenon of the Party’s political longevity is based on certain mechanisms. One of them is an active process of creating the big national business loyal to the Party. The AKP came to power as a party of small and medium-sized Anatolian entrepreneurs, while the big capital located in the Western part of the country traditionally supported the center-right secular parties and did not hide its rejection of the AKP as a ruling party. However, close interaction with the big national capital occupies an important place in the long-term strategic plans of the AKP government. As a result, it was possible to provide it in two ways: first, by winning a partial loyalty of the “old” big capital; second, and more important, by active efforts to create a “new” big capital (loyal to the new government) through privatization and transfer of state orders to companies closely connected with the Party on preferential terms. Some statistical assessments on identifying positions of the so-called Islamic business in the midst of the largest Turkish companies have allowed the authors to specify that the policy of “nurturing”, or rather “bringing up” to a bigger bourgeoisie loyal to the ruling AKP, is yielding results.
Keywords: Turkey, Justice and Development Party, Islamic bourgeoisie, MUSIAD, TUSIAD
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