The secular urbanites that formed the driving force of political modernisation in the country from the nineteenth century were largely a product of the bureaucratic patronage. Under the republican administration from 1923, a sharper dichotomy of ‘modernity’ and a benighted, retrograde ‘tradition’ (see Chapter 4) promoted by the bureaucracy would rear a generation of secular nationalists inhabiting the urban space, while dramatically inhibiting the religious political imagination. The bureaucracy would at once equally suppress a puny, yet resilient, leftist streak. At the first genuinely competitive election in 1950 in a newly introduced multi- party system, the non- urban votes would put in power a liberal- populist administration. Vaguely in league with the ruling liberals to start with, the left- leaning urbanites would later go on and, to a great extent, merge with the republicans now in opposition, together forming a resolute bloc of ‘progressives’ against the increasingly distrusted globalising forces embraced by the liberals, as well as against the religious passion partly awakened, which the liberals seemed to tolerate. This de facto alliance of the secular urbanites would by far pre- date two other, yet smaller, groups of city- dwellers that would later emerge to embody political ideas that had for some time been in the intellectual milieu, namely a conservative nationalism (milliyetçilik) and Islamo- nationalism (Millî Görüş). With the military coup in 1960 ending the liberal- populist regime, the leftists– by now having been dissolved to a large extent within the republican ideology – would start a lasting courtship with the military à la the Arab Ba'ath. This highly self- styled left politics would in time come to designate the whole bloc of progressives as ‘leftists’, later to be dubbed under the rule of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) from late 2002 as ‘the white Turks’. The defections of a number of public figures from this bloc of secular urbanites to the early AKP then championing democracy and a policy of open frontiers with the broader world would prove to be a crucial factor in gaining this political party systemic recognition and wider reach both domestically and internationally. Yet the secular axis of the urbanites would remain largely intact throughout the regime change between 2007 and 2011.