For outside observers, Turkey’s Saadet (Felicity) Party is hardly a matter of interest. Since the Islamist party's founding in 2001, its mandate has never risen above 2% of the national vote. However, in Turkey’s ever fluid politics, Saadet is gaining a new importance that may prove politically significant. It could present a more moderate Islamic alternative to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP).

The idea may sound odd, because in the early 21st century, it was not Saadet but the AKP that was the more moderate face of Turkey’s political Islam. Both parties were rooted in Turkey’s old school Islamism, which was led for decades by the late Necmettin Erbakan. Erbakan had always promoted a pan-Islamic foreign policy and a “just order” at home with Islamist themes such as an “interest-free” economy. When Erbakan’s coalition government was forced from power by the military in 1997, however, the reformist wing of his party broke up and founded the Justice and Development Party in 2001. It came to power only a year later and dominates Turkish politics to date. Meanwhile, Erbakan loyalists gathered in the Felicity Party, which survived as a small and dull vestige of the old Islamist line.

However, things have changed in Turkey quite dramatically in the past few years. The AKP abandoned the reformism of its early years, clung to power and began to establish an authoritarian regime, particularly after the failed coup of June 2016. Saadet, to its credit, did not join this drive. Quite the contrary, especially under its new leader Temel Karamollaoglu — a 77-year-old, mild-tempered, smiling engineer turned politician — Saadet began to voice a mild opposition, with Islamic references, to Erdogan and his government.

One of the themes Karamollaoglu repeatedly emphasizes is the blatant injustice of the post-coup crackdown. “Foundations are being closed down, scholars are being arrested,” he recently tweeted. He added, “What is their crime? To be in the opposition, to criticize the government.” Over the past year, Karamollaoglu has raised many similar criticisms toward the government’s authoritarianism and intentional deepening of the polarization of society, giving him sympathetic ears in the mainstream media and even secularist newspapers such as Sozcu.