Rise To Power
On 7 January 1946, he and former prime minister Celal Bayar formed the Democratic Party (DP), the fourth legal opposition party in Turkey, after the Progressive Republican Party formed by Ret. Gen. Kazım Karabekir in 1924, the Liberal Republican Party established by Ali Fethi Okyar in 1930, and the National Development Party (Milli Kalkınma Partisi) established by Nuri Demirağ in 1945, the first two of which were banned in at most a few months after their founding by the Republican People's Party (CHP), which was the party in power until 1950 elections in Turkey. He was elected deputy of Kütahya in the 1946 elections, in which the votes were cast out in the open and were counted in secret by the state apparatus working for the governing CHP. He became the highest-ranking man in the party after Celal Bayar. When the DP won 52% of the votes in the first free elections in Turkish history on 14 May 1950 (in which votes were cast in secret and counted openly), Menderes became prime minister, and in 1955 he also assumed the duties of foreign minister. He later won two more free elections, one in 1954 and the other in 1957.
During the 10 years of his term as prime minister, Turkish domestic and foreign politics underwent great changes. Industrialization and urbanization, which were started by Atatürk, but staggered by nationalization policies of İsmet İnönü and the effects of war, underwent rapid acceleration in Turkey. The Turkish economy grew at an unprecedented rate of 9% per annum over his 10 year administration, a feat which had and so far has not yet been duplicated. Turkey was admitted to NATO. With the economic support of the United States via the Marshall Plan, agriculture was mechanized; transport, energy, education, health care, insurance and banking progressed. In 1955, the Menderes government was blamed by his political opponents for orchestrating the Istanbul Pogrom, which targeted the city's substantial Greek minority.
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