Turkey Premier Boosted by Party’s Showing in By-Elections

A surprisingly strong victory in municipal by-elections has buoyed embattled Turkish Prime Minister Tansu Ciller, giving her a fresh mandate to tackle reforms and to pursue a free-trade pact with Europe, diplomats and commentators said Monday.

Ciller’s center-right True Path Party won 22 of 36 mayoral posts and polled 39% of the overall vote on Sunday, a performance unmatched by any party in a Turkish election for more than a decade. The pro-Islamic Welfare Party, meanwhile, saw its share of the vote slip slightly to 17%.

The result will reassure Turkey’s NATO allies, who were worried that their easternmost member was suffering from a leadership vacuum and a drift toward more Islamic, inward-looking nationalist and anti-Western policies.

The United States last week sent its ambassador to the European Union to Turkey to urge both sides not to lose the chance to seal the Europe trade pact, which diplomats see as a vital anchor for Muslim Turkey in the West.

Secretary of State Warren Christopher has also spoken of the need to reach out to a country recently identified by Washington as a key emerging market.

“The United States and the EU . . . have a special interest in supporting a democratic Turkey, integrated into the transatlantic community,” he said in a speech in Spain. “Turkey is at the strategic crossroads of the Balkans, the Middle East and the former Soviet states. We hope that the European Parliament will ratify the critically important customs union agreement.”

Before Sunday’s elections, Ciller had vowed to make her next priority a series of democratic reforms. They are needed both to clean up glaring human rights abuses and to impress the European Parliament, which meets in October to debate approving a March 6 decision by the European Commission to go ahead with the long-planned customs union.

The districts contested on Sunday involved only 88,000 voters out of a total population of 65 million people. But the vote had turned into a referendum on the customs union and even became a vote of confidence on whether Turkey’s first woman leader would survive at the head of her party.

President Suleyman Demirel had undermined her by attacking Europe and the trade pact. The Speaker of Parliament also had let it be known he would mount a challenge to Ciller’s leadership. Ministers and a bloc of right-wing deputies in her party had started to flout her leadership openly.

“I don’t think we’ll be hearing from them for a while. She’s proved herself a vote-catcher for the next elections [in 1996]. It’s a great victory for her personally,” one Western envoy said of Ciller, 49.