In Turkish Vote, Ruling Party Wins By Wide Margin
Result Is Rebuke to Secularists, Military

By Ellen Knickmeyer
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, July 23, 2007

ISTANBUL, July 23 -- Voters on Sunday overwhelmingly returned to power a political party that brought a mix of mild Islam and intense economic development to governing Turkey, rebuking the secular military whose challenge led to the early election.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party received an unmistakable mandate for a second five-year term. The party won 46.3 percent of the vote in unofficial results, with 99.9 percent of the votes counted early Monday.

"The national will at the ballot box has been realized freely and democratically, and Turkish democracy wins," Erdogan said in declaring victory to cheering supporters in the capital, Ankara. "We have passed this democratic test, and we will be an example to the world."

Erdogan's government, first elected in 2002 and by far the longest-serving Islamic-based government in modern Turkey's history, has offered the world a unique example of a religiously guided Islamic party governing within a stringently secular constitution. The Justice and Development Party has managed to bring a measure of prosperity while doing so, taming Turkey's wild inflation and pushing annual economic growth to more than 7 percent. Turkey's western and heartland cities are visibly more vibrant, crowded and thriving today than they were a decade ago.

But Erdogan alarmed Turkey's military and others in the country's largely urban and educated secularist bloc in April when he tried to push through parliament the presidential nomination of his foreign minister, Abdullah Gul. Gul's wife wears a Muslim head scarf.

Secularists saw that as a sign that the fundamentalism that has overtaken other Muslim countries was coming here. The military, which last overthrew a civilian government in 1997, hinted in a statement that it might step in again. That prompted Erdogan to call Sunday's parliamentary elections several months early.

Turnout Sunday was around 80 percent. Voters in well-off secular districts in Istanbul streamed into polling places throughout the day.

"In five years they're imposing more and more on secular people,'' Ethel Mizrahi, a secularist voter, said at a polling site in a school in Istanbul's Nisantasi district. "We're not feeling safe anymore."

Meanwhile, at districts loyal to the Justice and Development Party, voters flooded into polling places, with party officials shepherding the crowds at some sites.

Dya Alawa, 37, was among the party's backers waiting outside one busy site.

Economic gains meant her husband no longer had to worry about impromptu layoffs at his textile factory, Alawa said, while she could count on buying most staples at the same prices as five years ago.

"For me, my kitchen is what's important, and my issue is cooking oil, and that's why I'm voting AKP," she said, using the Justice and Development Party's Turkish initials.

Turks on Sunday gave Justice and Development the biggest percentage of votes in decades for a ruling party seeking a return to power. The party won about 340 of 550 seats.

Although the percentage of votes it received was up from the 34 percent it commanded going into the last parliament, the number of seats it won this time fell slightly and still is short of the 367 that Justice and Development would need to unilaterally name a new president.

While the military remains one of Turkey's most popular institutions and few criticize it publicly, many voters and political analysts interpreted Justice and Development's wide margin of victory as an endorsement of Erdogan in the face of the military's attempted intervention in politics in April.

"These are the people's orders" to the military, Hasan Cemal, a columnist for Milliyet newspaper, told Turkish TV.

The strong support shown for Erdogan's party Sunday would help insulate it from the military in the future, said Ali Carkoglu, a political analyst at Sabanci University in Istanbul. The military "basically cannot do anything, with that nearly 50 percent support," Carkoglu said. "This is not a banana republic. They can't tell them how to behave."

The Justice and Development Party is seeking European Union membership for Turkey.

It has resisted appeals from the military for the government to allow Turkey's armed forces to cross into northern Iraq to attack guerrilla bases of Turkish Kurds. Turkey has battled Kurdish separatists on its soil for decades and strongly resents the rise of a virtual Kurdish state in neighboring Iraq under U.S. military protection.

Public anger over the issue helped bring a third party, a far-right nationalist one, into parliament with Sunday's vote. The presence of the nationalists will complicate foreign policy, in particular, for Justice and Development.

A secularist left-wing party lost seats in Sunday's elections, although it still hit the 10 percent mark necessary to enter parliament.

Independent lawmakers, including about two dozen Kurds, also won posts Sunday.