The motley coalition led by ‘former’ Islamo- nationalists (Millî Görüş) in the wake of the massive economic crisis of February 2001, pushing the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) into power from November 2002, had to grapple with various forms of ‘foul play’ rather viciously introduced by the bureaucracy under the old regime. The bureaucratic resistance would soon be coupled with a newly emergent ‘neo- nationalist’ (ulusalcı) politics, the virtual engine behind a series of nationwide ‘patriotic’ demonstrations from April 2007 that would depict the AKP rule as akin to an apocalypse threatening the very survival of the nation. The ‘victimage’ staged at the legal probes from mid- 2007 by the incipient order, detailed in the preceding chapter, did rely, in other words, on some genuine grievances on the part of the government, quite apart from the plain ‘lynching’ to which the whole process would later be transformed through a deliberately randomised and partisan functioning of the justice system. The liberal intellectuals who constituted a key part of the informal bloc behind the ruling AKP until 2011, successfully marketing, as it would turn out, the project of regime change both domestically and internationally, attributed the ongoing resistance purely to a cynical bureaucracy at an all- out war to defend its long exercised privileges in the face of a full political participation of the masses promised in the change. The considerable support in society for the old- style bureaucratic rule, possibly as broad as about a quarter of the total number of voters, was in turn put down either to a republican elitism on the part of sections long ‘spoiled’ under the patronage of the bureaucracy or to evident ignorance in rationally appreciating the benefits of a fully normalised democracy. The later stage of the Arab Spring from 2012 would illustrate this notion as a serious handicap during transition, not only locally, but also in the greater region.