Rivals Resist Party’s Effort To Take Power
Savoring victory in elections that brought down Prime Minister Tansu Ciller, an Islamic leader whose party emerged as the biggest in parliament asked his secular rivals Monday to form a government with him.
But potential partners were sticking to pledges to shut Necmettin Erbakan and his Welfare Party out of power, which could force him to modify his plans to impose Islamic principles on Western-oriented Turkey.
Ciller, an economist who couldn’t revive Turkey’s economy, resigned after Welfare swept past her True Path party to take the biggest share of the vote Sunday and 158 of the 550 seats in parliament.
President Suleyman Demirel asked Ciller to lead a caretaker administration until a new government is formed, which could take weeks of political maneuvering.
Ciller’s party got 135 seats. Even if she could form a coalition with the Motherland Party, a bitter rival that won 132 seats, their combined strength wouldn’t be a majority and they couldn’t form a government.
The other parties that qualified for seats were both center-left - the People’s Republican Party got 50 and the Democratic Left Party got 75. The Democracy Party, which is pro-Kurdish, had 4.1 percent of the vote - less than the 10 percent needed to get seats in parliament.
“The nation made its decision. It needs to be respected,” said Erbakan, who spent part of the 1970s in self-imposed exile and was imprisoned by a military government in the 1980s for his political activities.
Motherland leader Mesut Yilmaz said a coalition with Welfare wasn’t possible, because “any overnight, radical changes were unlikely” in its policies.
Despite the rebuff from the center-right, Erbakan invited its leaders to form a coalition government, saying, “We will show the country how to make a pluralistic democracy work in a most effective way.”
The Welfare Party, whose political base is Turkey’s large population of urban poor, wants to put Islamic principles into law, including banning the payment of interest on loans.