1980 Turkish coup d'état
The political problems that motivated the coup was due to the political instability in Turkey between the period of 1970-1980. The political instability was shaped by the violence between left- and right-wing political groups and therefore the coup aimed to ease the violence between these groups. The army's stance, which carried out the coup, towards this political violence was more in support of the reduction of the left wing ideology and groups. There were two reasons regarding why the army was in support of right wing groups more, compared to their support for left-wing groups. The first reason was due to the unpopularity of communist ideology among the Turkish army. The army that carried out the coup was characterized by nationalist ideology. Therefore, communism was seen as a factor endangering this national unity, and thus the notion of nationalism, in Turkey. As a result, the political instability in Turkey became one of the motivations of the army to carry out the coup of 1980. The second reason why the army had an unfriendly view about communism was because of the Turkey-NATO relations. Turkey became a member of NATO in 1952, establishing its stance against communism's spread. Therefore, the 1980 Turkish army believed that rising communism in Turkey, being a NATO member state, could damage its relations with other NATO member states. Thus, isolating the rising communist movements became the second motivation for the army to carry out a coup. In this respect, the army and their nationalistic and anti-communism ideology was mainly supported by the Nationalist Movement Party (Turkish: Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi (MHP)). On the other hand, MHP believed that the arising communist groups were supported by Republican People’s Party (Turkish: Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi (CHP)), which was represented by Bulent Ecevit as the prime minister of Turkey. Thus, MHP and the Turkish army accepted Bulent Ecevit as the reason for Turkey’s political and economic instability.