One frequently articulated observation by the critics claimed with the regime change that the new and as yet amorphous order, in place roughly from 2011, was shifting in its early phase conspicuously towards reproducing the old one. The critics included some of the former supporters of the government, who had grown increasingly disenchanted and bitter, particularly the small group of liberal intellectuals that had earlier been skilfully co- opted by the ruling Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) into the broad informal coalition against the status quo. The ‘authoritarianism’ characteristic of the republican rule for close to a century had merely changed hands, and returned– possibly with a vengeance. This ‘new’ authoritarianism, palpable from mid- 2013, and playing havoc with some of the most basic rights and the rule of law on a scale arguably hitherto unobserved, with the possible exception of brief periods in the past directly controlled by the military, would soon push the domestic scene into a thick and escalating political mayhem. The phenomenal rise of the AKP, which had called itself ‘conservative democrat’ for about a decade from its inception, had prompted some of the affiliated literati euphorically to re- embrace the long- forgotten tag ‘Islamist’ in an impassioned debate in the pro- government media already in the summer of 2012. This shift in the discourse in circles known to be intimate with the actual power holders, and ubiquitous in no time through rather uninhibited speculations and suggestions of some of the local Islamist ideologues, would do little towards soothing the profound insecurity felt all along by the secular urbanites with the AKP gaining mandate from late 2002– anxieties that were not always well grounded, thinly disguising a hankering for the erstwhile ‘anti- majoritarian’ order that had largely disenfranchised the pious and practising Muslims, among other dissident political groups. Having received the support of close to half of the overall electorate by 2011 in a steady increase, the AKP was unequivocally and hugely successful. In the subsequent period this political party would ostensibly choose strategies to hold on to that base at the cost of further alienating the other half.