Parties face protest votes as Turkey goes to the polls

NATO member Turkey voted yesterday in parliamentary polls that could change the political landscape of a country mired in economic crisis and facing the threat of war in neighbouring Iraq.

Surveys show a big lead for the year-old Justice and Development Party (AKP) accused by Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit of harbouring a secret “Islamist” agenda.

Established parties face a huge protest vote after two economic crises that have caused widespread poverty and unemployment. Corruption has also become a major issue.

Many familiar figures, including Ecevit, may be consigned to oblivion, their parties adrift of the 10% vote needed to enter parliament.

Surveys show up to 20% of voters undecided to the last.

Adding to the uncertainty is the fact that no-one knows who will become prime minister if the AKP wins.

AKP leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who served four months of a 10-month jail sentence for Islamist sedition in the late 1990s, is banned from parliament. The chief prosecutor is also moving to close the party on technical grounds.

Markets - which appear reassured by the AKP’s insistence that it is not Islamist and backs pro-Western, secularist policies - seek swift action from whatever government emerges to restore political confidence, bring down interest rates on massive debt and safeguard a $16 billion IMF crisis pact.

The United States, Turkey’s closest ally, will look to Ankara for use of air bases and other support in any attack on Iraq. The European Union, which Turkey wants to join, is also watching the election closely.

Erdogan walked with his wife from his flat in a conservative area of Istanbul to a school to vote. “We expect success, we expect a one-party government,” he told Reuters. Supporters followed the ex-Istanbul mayor chanting “Erdogan - prime minister.”

Prime minister, however, is something that Erdogan, for all his personal popularity, cannot become, even if the AKP wins.

The ban on Erdogan - who denies the Islamist label and portrays his party as pro-Western, pro-EU and backing the IMF pact - means he cannot enter government in any capacity. He would, however, exert power from behind the scenes.

In the mainly Kurdish Sirnak province, on the Iraqi border, where camps are ready for refugees who may flood in if there is a war, voting started slowly.

Turkey fears war could spawn a Kurdish state in northern Iraq and reignite Kurdish separatist fighting in its own southeast that cost 30,000 lives over 15 years and still overshadows the region.

Markets hope for a “Grand Coalition” between the AKP and the leftist Republican People’s Party, the only mainstream party in the hope that Kemal Dervis, who forged the IMF pact after a severe crisis last year, would return to government.