TURKEY: Turkey's ruling AKP wins Parliamentary elections

In a blow to Turkey's secularists, the ruling AKP party won a resounding victory in the Turkish elections. Turkey's ruling AK Party won a resounding election victory on Sunday (July 22), giving the pro-business, Islamist-rooted party a mandate for reform but risking fresh tensions with the secular elite. The result is a moral triumph for Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan who called early parliamentary polls after losing a battle with the establishment, including army generals, who did not want his ex-Islamist ally as head of state. With nearly all votes counted, his party won 47 percent, up some 13 points on 2002, but a more united opposition means it will get around 341 out of 550 seats, slightly fewer than now. "We have common esteem and targets; to carry our democratic, social republic to higher levels," Erdogan told thousands of jubilant supporters outside his party's plush new headquarters in the capital Ankara where fireworks lit the sky. "We will continue to work in stability to achieve our European Union targets," he said of strained efforts to join the bloc and anchor his country more firmly to the West. "I am here for Tayyip Erdogan. I am very happy because he was re-elected and I am proud of him. We will not stop, we will continue on our path," said one supporter Yasar Kemerlioglu. "I am here for AKP (Justice and development Party). Our party won it (elections). We are very happy. We will not stop, we will continue on our path," said another supporter, Hatice Oztahinci at the rally in Ankara. Only two other, secularist, parties crossed the 10 percent threshold into parliament -- the nationalist-minded Republican People's Party (CHP) on 21 percent and the far-right National Movement Party (MHP) on 14 percent. "Our voters gave our party the duty of being the main opposition party according to this result," said CH Party Secretary Onder Sav at a news conference after initial results were released. A score of mainly Kurdish independents also got in, the first Kurds in the assembly since the early 1990s -- prompting wild celebrating in their troubled eastern heartland. In cities across Turkey Erdogan's fans danced, honked car horns, and waved huge flags with the party emblem, a lightbulb. The parties had fought over economic reform, Kurdish separatist violence, efforts to join a hesitant EU and religion's place in a country of 74 million people that stretches from the EU in the west to Iran and Iraq in the east. Voters seem to have dismissed opposition warnings that the AK Party secretly sought an Iranian-style theocracy, despite mass rallies this year in defence of the rigid state-religion divide in Turkey, one of the Muslim world's few democracies. Erdogan, 53, has presided over an economic boom, record foreign investment, and in a sign of market cheer at his win the lira gained almost 2 percent on the dollar in early Asian trade. Economists said Turkey's most popular politician could now press on with free-market policies and kick-start stalled EU membership talks, despite disillusionment at joining the bloc. The army views itself as the defender of Turkey's secular state and has ousted four cabinets in 50 years, most recently an Islamist-minded predecessor of the AK Party in 1997. Erdogan made conciliatory comments towards his secularist foes, quoting the revered Mustafa Kemal Ataturk who founded the republic in 1923 out of the ashes of the Ottoman empire. The next government will quickly face challenges, such as finding a compromise candidate for president -- treading lightly to keep the army at bay -- and deciding on sending the army into northern Iraq to crush PKK Kurdish rebels based there.

ITN Source | July 23, 2007

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