The Islamist Justice and Development Party rewrote the Turkish political map on Sunday with a landslide election victory. Gareth Jenkins reports from Ankara Click to view caption Provisional results indicated that the Islamist Justice and Development Party (JDP) had won 34.4 per cent of the popular vote -- giving it 364 seats in the 550- seat unicameral parliament. The social democratic Republican People's Party (RPP) was the only other party to pass the 10 per cent threshold required for representation in parliament, winning 19 per cent of the votes and 179 seats. The remaining seven seats were won by independent candidates. The JDP had been expected to emerge from the elections as the largest party in parliament but the scale of its victory has sent a shockwave through the country, particularly through Turkey's secular establishment led by the military. Prior to the elections, opinion polls had suggested that the JDP would fall short of a parliamentary majority and would need to establish coalition with the RPP, which secularists had hoped would act as a moderating force. In a damning indictment of the incumbent government, all of the members of the coalition which had ruled Turkey since the previous election in April 1999 suffered massive losses -- paying the price for widespread corruption and overseeing the country's worst economic crisis in more than 50 years. The Democratic Left Party of Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit -- which had been the largest party in parliament since the 1999 elections -- saw its vote collapse from 22.2 per cent to just 1.2 per cent. The votes of coalition partners, the ultra-nationalist Nationalist Action Party (NAP) and centre-right Motherland Party (MP), fell from 18.0 per cent to 8.3 per cent and from 13.2 per cent to 5.1 per cent respectively. The front-page headline of the daily Finansal Forum listing the election results read: 'The People's Revenge'. Even many non-Islamists were delighted by the JDP's success. "I do not support the JDP and would never vote for a religious party but I am so happy that those politicians who robbed us for so many years and created the economic crisis which made so many people unemployed have finally been punished," said Ayten Gorgun, a 34 year-old journalist. Within hours of the announcement of the results, NAP chairman Devlet Bahceli announced his resignation, to be followed on Monday morning by Tansu Ciller, leader of True Path Party (TPP) -- which failed to secure any seats in parliament after its vote dropped from 12 per cent to 9.5 per cent. Ecevit and MP Chairman Mesut Yilmaz are expected to follow suit within the next few days. Public satisfaction at purging Turkish politics of a generation of corrupt and incompetent politicians has been mixed with apprehension about the possibility of a confrontation between the incoming JDP government and the Turkish military. It is still not clear who will be prime minister. Once the election results are made official, the Turkish president is expected to call on the JDP to form a new government. Most of those who voted for the JDP did so because they liked and trusted Tayyip Erdogan, the JDP's charismatic 48-year-old chairman. But Erdogan is banned from becoming a member of parliament or a minister as a result of a 1999 conviction for reciting a religious poem. In practice, the Turkish people have elected someone as a prime minister who cannot serve as prime minister. The result is likely to be a bizarre situation in which Erdogan appoints someone to serve as prime minister. The JDP deputy chairman Abdullah Gul appears the most likely candidate -- but then effectively runs the country by remote control as a member of neither parliament nor the council of ministers. After two of its predecessors were closed down by the Turkish courts for allegedly advocating the erosion of secularism, the JDP had been anxious not to adopt an explicitly Islamist election manifesto. Once it assumes power it is likely to tread very cautiously at first. But privately JDP officials make no secret that their ultimate goal is to increase the role of religion in public life. Perhaps more importantly, the vast majority of the JDP's supporters see it as an Islamist party and expect it to deliver on pre-election promises such as a pledge to lift the ban on women wearing headscarves from entering state institutions -- which is currently preventing hundreds of thousands of young girls from attending university. The JDP has also been adamantly opposed to Turkish participation in any US-led military campaign to topple Saddam Hussein and has long expressed deep misgivings about Turkey's close military ties with Israel. If it had merely been the largest partner in a coalition government, the JDP could have blamed its coalition partner for its failure to fulfil its pre-election promises. But its huge parliamentary majority does not leave it with many excuses. Yet every step it takes will be closely watched by the Turkish General Staff, which has already made it clear that it will intervene to prevent any erosion of secularism or disruption of what it believes are vital strategic alliances with the US and Israel. Caught between pressure from its own supporters and the ever-present threat of a military coup, the JDP may yet live to rue Sunday's stunning success.
