COLUMN ONE : Turkey’s Ambitious 1st Couple : The Bushes’ weekend guests are a flashy, controversial pair. In Turgut and Semra Ozal, some see democratic reformers. Others are reminded of the Perons.

She was a teen-age typist, the vivacious daughter of a shipyard welder. He was a new-minted electrical engineer, the ambitious son of a provincial bank worker. Her typewriter broke down rather more often than usual, but he was always there to fix it--and perhaps to break it again as an excuse to return. Their courtship spiced office life at a backwater Turkish ministry in the stuffy, somnolent 1950s.

Such is the stuff of romantic legend and contemporary political history along the continents-spanning Bosporus.

Today, engineer Turgut Ozal is the bulldozer president-in-a-hurry of a crossroads nation that prays east to Islam but looks west to Europe and the United States for economic and political inspiration. Semra, his wife of 37 years, types no more. In secular, emancipating Turkey, she has political ambitions, too.

Together, the Ozals are as eye-catching--and contentious--a first couple as any on the world stage. They are forcefully flashy. They are controversial. Power is their metier and their joy.

Political friends see the high-flying Ozals as red tape-cutting reformers, overdue iconoclasts pointing Turkey toward a prosperous, democratic future. Enemies are more reminded of the Perons, the Marcoses and the royal families of Turkey’s bygone Ottoman Empire.

This weekend, as singular American thanks for Turkey’s support in the Persian Gulf crisis, Semra and Turgut Ozal will be house guests of President Bush and his wife, Barbara, at Camp David.

Bush and Ozal consulted by telephone about 40 times during the crisis; Ozal occasionally plays taped highlights of their conversations to select supporters, according to a European ambassador in Ankara.

At Camp David, the two presidents “will review the outstanding progress made in U.S.-Turkish relations during the past year, discuss the Gulf situation and other international issues,” the White House says.

Next week, the 64-year-old Turkish president lectures at the University of North Carolina, Duke, Penn and Princeton.

On campus, as on a country weekend, Ozal will have plenty to say. He bristles with ideas. There is not a temporizing whit, nor a cautious bone, in his body. On a tour of the Soviet Union last week, Ozal, according to Turkish newspapers, advised Boris N. Yeltsin, the maverick president of the Russian Republic: “Stop zig-zagging; go straight to the problem like a bull to a red cape.” A Turkish commentator called the injunction “vintage Ozal.”

Ozal is a nation-builder. Since 1983, first as prime minister and then as president, he has overseen epochal modernization at the same break-neck speed with which he likes to drive the presidential BMW, his wife feeding the Turkish equivalent of country and western music into the cassette deck.

Most Turks agree with Ozal’s pro-West, free market thrust. But an overwhelming majority of voters quarrel with his leadership. He has an unassailable majority in Parliament and almost six years left in his term, but only about 20% of Turks now say they would vote for him.

Opponents depict Ozal as an autocrat in a democrat’s clothing, making policy on impulse, favoring his family and friends, changing the democratic rules as he goes along to preserve his power. Elected by Parliament, he is now lobbying for constitutional reform to mandate direct presidential elections.

Frustrated and outraged by Ozal’s powerful, sometimes arbitrary exercise of power, opposition political parties accuse him of nepotism and of corruption. There were questions in Parliament when Semra Ozal ordered a military helicopter to fetch her dress designer. Turgut Ozal’s reputation is not enhanced by the spectacle of his son, Efe, as a getting-rich-quick broker in an Istanbul stock market with no restrictions against insider trading.

Ozal’s admirers say he has restored vigor to Turkey. They point to booming economic development that has revolutionized millions of lives in a nation of 57 million where the 20th Century is still a newcomer for many.

What troubles even Ozal’s friends, though, is that there has been a steady erosion of talented administrators from his government without substantive replacement. Worse, there is scant institutionalization of Ozal-ramrodded reforms or modernization. They wonder how much of Ozal’s Turkey would survive Ozal’s passing.

Under Ozal, the Turkish government is a one-man symphony. “We read about foreign policy changes in the papers like everybody else,” said one embittered Turkish diplomat.

When Ozal was prime minister, the Turkish president was a figurehead. Now that he is president, with nearly six years to go in his term, the prime minister whom Ozal chose to replace him lives in shadow.

Cabinet ministers long ago stopped pretending that they had been consulted before major new initiatives. Earlier this month, Ozal took everyone by surprise when he overturned a 60-year-old pillar of Turkish nationalist policy by opening talks with Kurdish rebels in Iraq. Turkey’s health minister explained self-defensively that there was no reason he should have known in advance about the secret meeting Ozal had engineered since none of the participants had been sick.

“Such overnight policy switches are the sorts of things that happen in sultanates--or dictatorships,” said a European diplomat whose country is cool to Ozal’s application for Turkey to join the European Community.

For Ozal, power is meant to be used. When his mother, Hafize, died, he buried her in the shadow of the tomb here of 16th Century hero Suleiman The Magnificent.

Ozal thinks. He acts.

“He is a man without complexes. He confronts each situation immediately and reacts,” said Kaya Toperi, Ozal’s spokesman.

Four relentless years after bypass surgery in the United States, Ozal never stops. He takes pride at being plugged in, whether in saving the universe from asteroid invaders with his grandchildren at a video arcade, or in a presidential office where he shamelessly indulges his affliction as a television news junkie. He became such a familiar face on American TV during the Gulf crisis that one opponent labeled him “CNN’s Ankara correspondent.”

The mustachioed Ozal, who speaks excellent English, is built like an Ottoman mortar: squat and wide. All the better, says Ozal, who is fond of prize fight analogies; a Turkish politician needs a big belly with which to take partisan punches.

Ozal takes his hits, but opponents seldom escape unscathed. Fiercely loyal to friends, he is implacably hostile to enemies and former friends, including renegades who have strayed from the ruling Motherland Party that he founded in 1983 and led to power.

“No one can achieve anything in the Motherland Party by opposing me,” Ozal has said.

That remains to be seen. As the Ozals regally journey to an image-buffing weekend in the Maryland countryside, Motherland is in rebellion over Semra Ozal’s candidacy for leadership of its key Istanbul branch.

Like her husband, the short, blond, chunky mother of three is a taboo-smasher in a conservative Muslim country weaned on a tradition of veiled, subservient women. Semra Ozal holds hands with her husband in public. They go shooting together at a firing range, where she practices with the pistol she carries in her purse.

Turkey’s First Lady has affection for whiskey, nightclubs, flamboyant clothes, an occasional cigar and a daily crossword puzzle. Her age is a state secret, although most Turkish newspapers think that Semra Ozal is around 57.

There is no secret of her commitment to equal rights in a country where only six of 325 members of Parliament are women. A women’s group she helped found, nicknamed the Daisies after its symbol, promotes birth control and civil contract marriages, in which the woman has equal rights to inheritance, and to child custody in the event of divorce.

“I am different from the old presidents’ wives. I don’t sit in the corner and do as protocol dictates. I am an active wife,” Semra Ozal says.

Some Turks think she is a forthright, clear-thinking symbol of the modern Turkish woman. To others, she will never be more than brassy, grasping and uncompromisingly nouveau riche.

Turkish reporters who cover Semra Ozal say it was her own decision to enter politics as the liberal, Western-oriented candidate to head Motherland’s most important branch.

“The party is my baby,” she said at the time, furiously denying speculation that her candidacy was a family conspiracy aimed at launching her toward the prime minister’s office.

The political newcomer--no surprise--has the unreserved backing of the Turkish president. But not his party. At Semra Ozal’s debut luncheon, 20 of 25 Motherland district leaders in Istanbul were conspicuous by their absence.

That brought Turgut Ozal out swinging for his wife in her race against Talat Yilmaz, a 39-year-old iron and steel merchant supported by Islamic conservatives within Motherland.

Turgut Ozal fired his defense minister--a relative--for opposing Semra Ozal’s candidacy. But at least three other Cabinet ministers balked, as well.

The Ozal campaign fell short at a chaotic party conference here this month marked by fistfights, ballot-rigging and apparently bogus assassination threats. A new election is scheduled next month.

Time enough then, after the visit to the United States, for Motherland faithful to decide whether there is room for two powerful Ozals in Turkey’s free-swinging political flux.

A LOOK AT TURKEY AND ITS PRESIDENT Population: 56.5 million. Capital: Ankara. Area: 301,381 square miles (roughly twice the size of California). Languages: Turkish (official), Kurdish and Arabic. Ethnic groups: Turks (85%), Kurds (12%). Monetary unit: Turkish lira. Religion: Islam (Sunni) 98%, Christians, Jews. Principal products: Cotton, tobacco, cereals, sugar beets, fruits and nuts. Major trade partners: United States, Britain, Japan, Soviet Union, Germany, France, Italy and Iran. Name: Turgut Ozal. Title: President of Turkey since Nov. 6, 1983. Age: 64 Personal: Born in Malatya, in eastern Turkey, in 1927. Married to Semra Ozal for 37 years. They have two sons and a daughter. Education: Graduated from Istanbul Technical University in 1950 with electrical engineering degree and subsequently studied in the United States.

After working on a number of hydroelectric power stations, he played an important role in the planning and construction of dams in Anatolia. Political career: Special technical adviser in 1965 to then-Prime Minister Suleiman Demirel, now his bitter rival for power. Served as project adviser for World Bank in early 1970s. He became a key Demirel aide in 1975. In 1980, he wrote an economic recovery program calling for Draconian austerity.

After a military coup in September, 1980, he became deputy premier in charge of economic affairs. He quit the Cabinet in 1982, and when military rule was lifted the next year, he returned to politics as founding chairman of Motherland Party.