In 1989, Turgut Ozal, the conservative Motherland Party became Prime Minister, chosen as Turkey's first civilian head of state since 1960. He died in 1993, leaving Demirel as his replacement as the country's president.

In a short amount of time, Economics Minister Tansu Çiller replaced Demirel as the leader of the True Path Party and became Turkey's first female Prime Minister.

In December of 1995, Çiller's party was defeated in parliamentary elections, but the next year, she and Mesut Yilmaz of the Motherland Party formed a coalition government. In this coalition, Yilmaz became the Prime Minister and was to hold his rank until 1997, when Çiller was supposed to take over. This coalition was threatened in April over questions of corruption. The coalition eventually fell apart over such difficulties. In May 1996, an Islamic extremist tried to assassinate President Demirel because Turkey had signed a military-cooperation agreement with Israel.

In 1990 and 1991, during the Persian Gulf War, Turkey supported the international effort to force Iraq out of Kuwait. Even so, Turkish troops did not enter the war. At the end of the war, many Iraqi Kurds crossed the border into Turkey to avoid more skirmishes with the Iraqi government. The Turkish government had been fighting Turkish Kurds since 1984, and in 1992, as Kurds crossed the Turkey-Iraq border, fighting escalated. Throughout 1994, relations became even more strained between the Turkish government and Kurdish separatists under the leadership of the Marxist secessionist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).

In 1995, thousands of Turkish troops entered northern Iraq in a violent effort to prevent PKK rebels from starting cross-border raids into Turkey. The Turkish troops took control of the border and moved inside of Iraq to surround Turkish Kurdish guerilla areas in the region. Officials from Turkey's government claimed that they would only withdraw with the creation of a security border zone. When international criticism grew though, Turkey withdrew its troops after six weeks only to reenter in June of 1996.