Next Step : Turks Aiming to Use Election to Force Ozal Into Early Retirement : * Foes seek enough seats to amend the constitution and kick him out. ‘They can’t bring me down,’ president counters.

It was orchestrated by a French media guru and played out against a pulsating backdrop of African drum rhythms. Yet for all its fast-paced pizazz, the shindig to kick off the ruling Turkish Motherland Party’s reelection bid was missing something.

There was nary a mention of party founder and President Turgut Ozal, the leader who symbolizes the dramatic changes in Turkey over the last decade.

“I do not know this man,” said Jacques Seguela, the Frenchman who is orchestrating the political campaign, referring to Ozal. “My campaign is for Prime Minister (Mesut) Yilmaz, no one else. I ask you to choose the new Motherland . . . a flame that burns for modernity and a Turkey in Europe.”

Although no single party of the nine contesting next Sunday’s national elections for places in Turkey’s 450-seat Parliament seems set to win a majority, diplomats say one thing is certain. As a European ambassador put it: “Ozal will effectively be finished, whatever the result.”

Ozal, whose presidential term runs until 1996, could be forced out early by a constitutional change if some of his opponents have their way. And even if he remains until his term runs out, his dominance of Turkish political and economic life is sure to be sharply curtailed.

“Even if Yilmaz stays in office, it will be his personal victory, not Ozal’s,” the ambassador said. “A lot of policies will be changed and, frankly, we’ll miss them.”

Ozal has taken a sometimes unwilling Turkey firmly into a U.S. orbit, speaking weekly with President Bush as part of a close alliance during the Gulf crisis.

The Turkish president always preached “nothing risked, nothing gained,” reversing inward-looking, restrictive economic policies. He opened his country up to the outside world and started to dismantle bans on cultural rights for the country’s 12 million Kurds.

But Ozal made mistakes, too. A war of nerves with Bulgaria brought a wave of 330,000 ethnic Turkish refugees in 1989. Above all, Ozal failed to honor repeated promises to bring inflation down from an annual rate of 30% reached in 1983; now prices are rising at a 70% annual rate.

Polls say the conservative True Path Party of four-time former Prime Minister Suleyman Demirel, 67, will probably win the most seats in Parliament, followed by the center-right Motherland or Erdal Inonu’s Social Democrat Populist Party.

Demirel downplayed the prospects for political upheaval in an interview. “Actually you may not change the policy,” he said. “The handling is different. We will still keep going with the United States and Western Europe. Ideology is gone. Pragmatism has replaced left and right.”

But while Ozal has made more than 70 foreign trips during his years in power, Demirel has not been outside Turkey since the 1970s, and he has much to do to prove that he has really changed from that crisis-ridden period of Turkish history.

The two main opposition parties have a central election promise: to unseat Ozal by changing the constitution and calling a new election, which requires a two-thirds majority in Parliament and will involve a major struggle.

The 64-year-old president says it is legally impossible to unseat him before his term expires in 1996 but adds that he would challenge both Inonu and Demirel in an election for an executive presidency.

“They can’t bring me down. . . . All they are good for is opposition,” Ozal told reporters last week.

Ozal has become pugnacious and introspective at this turn in a career that started from humble origins as an electrical engineer. He went on to become a World Bank desk officer, business executive, senior state bureaucrat and ultimately president in 1983.

He tried to maintain the military’s political bans on his main rivals in 1987. Failing in that, he called snap elections in which fine-tuning of electoral laws won him two-thirds of the seats in Parliament with one-third of the votes.

Undeterred by a 1989 collapse to 21% Motherland support in local elections, Ozal used his majority in Parliament to have himself elected president. Opposition parties on the left and the right have boycotted him ever since, denouncing his involvement of the constitutionally neutral presidency in everyday politics.

“Will all these mistakes go unrequited? If he is not punished by democratic means for breaching the constitution, how can the rule of law take root in a country?” asked Hasan Cemal, editor of the respected center-left daily newspaper Cumhuriyet.

According to sources close to the president, Ozal’s main fault has been increasing reliance on an ever-narrower family circle led by his wife, Semra Ozal, elected to lead the key Motherland Party branch in Istanbul in April.

“If it hadn’t been for the ‘dynasty,’ Yilmaz might have made even better progress than he has. The Ozals’ star is waning,” said Gungor Mengi, chief columnist of Sabah, Turkey’s biggest daily newspaper.

At times Ozal says that he wishes he had stepped aside in 1989; at other times he says that he will go down fighting.

First Lady Semra Ozal, also a parliamentary candidate, is fighting the opposition with vigor. She even accused rival party leaders of “not having any children, and childless people have no love, no compassion.” She has shown some insensitivity defending her family against allegations of nepotism and corruption by saying her stockbroker son Efe’s luxury Bosporus-side penthouse was “an attic she couldn’t live in.”

The Ozals’ other son, Ahmet, holds shares in Turkey’s popular but controversial Star 1 private television channel, which has outdone state television in supporting the Ozal line.

For his part, Ozal failed to help his cause when he tried unsuccessfully to prop up sagging prices during a visit last week to the Istanbul Stock Exchange, whose rebirth has been a major achievement of the Ozal era.

Ozal promised state support for stock prices, but instead of helping, his statements triggered panic selling that sent the market down 6% in two days. “He just wasn’t convincing,” said Turkey’s leading financial daily Dunya.

Ozal repeatedly speaks out to defend the impressive parts of his record in a decade when electricity and telephones reached every corner of the country, an export-led recovery overcame a chronic foreign debt, and Turkey began joint production of weapons like F-16 fighters and Stinger ground-to-air missiles.

But commentators agree that Ozal’s campaigning is a disadvantage for Prime Minister Yilmaz, who has distanced himself from the Ozal family and goes to great pains not to be seen speaking to Ozal.

Sources close to Yilmaz suggest that an honorable defeat in what has so far been a remarkably peaceful campaign might actually be in his long-term interest.

“Mr. Yilmaz is 43. He has another 25 years in politics,” one of his close aides said. “If you were him, wouldn’t you stand aside for a few years, sort out your party and stage your comeback when the other leaders have cleared up the Ozal legacy and are too old to stand again?”

Ozal’s Ascent Here are milestones of Turgut Ozal’s rise to the Turkish presidency: 1927--Born in Malatya, in eastern Turkey. 1950--Graduated from Istanbul Technical University with an electrical engineering degree and subsequently studied in the United States. 1965--Special technical adviser to then-Prime Minister Suleyman Demirel, now his rival for power. Early 1970s--Served as project adviser for World Bank. 1975--Became a key Demirel aide. 1980--Wrote an economic recovery program calling for extreme austerity. After 1980 coup--Became deputy prime minister in charge of economic affairs. 1982--Quit the Cabinet. 1983--Returned to politics as founding chairman of the Motherland Party after military rule was lifted. Has served as president since Nov. 6, 1983.