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By 1954, a total of 1,551,206 hectares of land, mostly owned by the state, had been distributed to about 100,000 families, leaving at least ten times more peasants in need of land. The main difficulty arose of course from the fact that Turkey had not sufficient cultivable land for all, even if landholdings were brought down to the minimum size. The political regime began to be liberalized in the summer of 1945, when the first opposition party, the National Resurgence party, with a programme of moral rejuvenation, was established by a rich contractor, Nuri Demirag.

Some even proposed to train an aristocratic elite of technicians and administrators in the West, and entrust the modernization of Turkey to them. Education placed emphasis on instruction, theoretical knowledge and far less on doing, creating and participating. The schools did not visualize the intellectual refinement of the human being as the ultimate goal but contented them542 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 MODERN TURKEY selves merely with preparing good citizens for the state.

Peasants, workers, the lower middle classes and other dissatisfied groups supported the party, and in fact forced its leaders to take seriously their opposition to the government. Meanwhile, the government liberalized the press and the Law of Association, and introduced the system of direct voting. The president's title of National Leader was dropped. The first national elections were held in 1946, in an atmosphere rendered tense by the Republicans' tampering with the election results. The Democratic Party, nevertheless, elected sixty-four deputies who found in the Assembly the most effective propaganda rostrum.