NPR: Turks Look Ready to Give Current PM Another Term

Turks Look Ready to Give Current PM Another Term

My wife has been in Turkey for the past three weeks on business. So I listened with particular interest to Ivan Watson's piece on Morning Edition about how Istanbul is changing as waves of rural migrants move there to improve their lives and often find grinding poverty instead.

Many of these rural migrants will play a key role in this weekend's Turkish elections. Because my wife speaks Turkish, she's been able to fill me in on what the Turkish press (and people) has been saying about the popularity of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Erdogan is the former Islamist leader who has become one of Turkey's most reformist leaders. He has introduced many reforms sought by the European Union that have opened his country up more to the global community and worked to revive the country's economy.

But speculation that he would try and have himself picked as the next president sparked a showdown with more secular, nationalist forces in Turkey. The same backlash occurred when he announced his party's official candidate, Abdullah Gul, a cabinet member with similar religious beliefs. So Erdogan called for early elections around this issue of how the president is selected.

London's Times Online writes in an editorial that the effects of this weekend's election should be a concern for everyone in Europe.

In a strange twist, the Financial Times reports that even if Erdogan's center-right, pro-business party wins more than 40 percent of the vote (up from 34 percent), it will likely win fewer seats in the 550-seat parliament than it did last time. Under the Turkish electoral system, a party must win 10 percent of the vote to win seats in the parliament. In 2002, only two parties reached that total. This time, three are expected to gain 10 percent, meaning fewer seats will be given to Erdogan's party, regardless of its share of the popular vote.

4:59 PM ET | 07-16-2007 | permalink

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