newly established parties. The Justice Party ultimately emerged as a triumphant winner, winning around 46% of the vote and establishing itself as the most popular party in the country. With its popular appeal well established, the Justice Party turned to issues of leadership. Gümüşpala died in 1964, and questions soon emerged over who would succeed him as the party's leader. Sadettin Bilgiç, a doctor by training, had become acting party president following Gümüşpala's death, and initially emerged as the favorite for the position. But the Turkish press tarnished Bilgiç's reputation, accusing him of political and religious conservatism. Party leaders soon started to worry that he would ruin the party's image with the Turkish intelligentsia and, more importantly, the army. Indeed, the military head of state, Cemal Gürsel, began pushing for a more progressive candidate to take charge - Süleyman Demirel. Demirel came from a modest village background, and climbed up the social latter by the way of his education. He had studied in the United States as an Eisenhower fellow and then worked in a US multinational construction company. He appealed to the party's base of newly urbanized rural migrants, who could identify with his modest beginnings and status as a self-made man. At the Justice Party's national convention in December 1964, Demirel ultimately defeated Bilgiç for the party's general-president post. Once firmly in charge, Demirel began his assault on İnönü's fragile coalition, making sure it failed to win a vote of confidence in early 1965. Parliamentary bickering finally led to the triumphant 1965 elections, in which the Justice Party received nearly 53% of the vote and promptly formed a majority government with 240 seats. The party had achieved this result by appealing to small-holder peasants emerging from poverty, small commercial and industrial groups as well as the newly rich farmers; it performed most strongly in the relatively rich western provinces of Turkey, along the Aegean coast and in Thrace. This Justice Party victory was simultaneously a historical loss for the Republican People's Party, which suffered the worst defeat in its political history by winning only 134 seats and 29% of the vote. Decline The Justice Party's good fortune, however, did not last for long. The small Anatolian enterprises that had formed a key part of the party's constituency couldn't compete with the Istanbul area's large, modern corporations. These entrepreneurs felt betrayed, and defected from the Justice Party to smaller