Turkish Court Annuls Vote of Confidence in Coalition

This nation was thrown into political disarray Tuesday as the Constitutional Court ripped the carpet from under the feet of its wobbly coalition government, formed two months ago to keep the country’s increasingly influential Islamists out of power.

The court annulled the parliament’s vote of confidence in the coalition because it was not an absolute majority vote, as parliamentary regulations dictate.

The ruling was an extraordinary indictment of the gridlocked mess that Turkish politics is in. The March 12 vote approving the secularist, center-right coalition was 257-207--but there were 80 abstentions, so a majority of 273 was needed. Initially, no one appeared to notice, but the pro-Islamic Welfare Party soon spotted the problem and cried foul.

Flush with delight Tuesday, Welfare Party leader Necmettin Erbakan welcomed the court’s 9-2 vote in favor of his protest and called on Prime Minister Mesut Yilmaz to resign.

“There is no kind of government in Turkey at the moment. Yilmaz must hand back his mandate today. A government without a vote of confidence does not exist,” said Erbakan, who believes he can now form a pro-Islamic administration.

A republic of 63 million mostly Muslim people, Turkey has been ruled for 70 years by secular, pro-Western governments.

The Constitutional Court rejected Erbakan’s demand that it order the dissolution of the government. But even if the coalition partners decide to hold the vote again and ask abstainers to stay outside the assembly hall and thus out of the vote altogether, the result would be hard to predict.

The two parties in the coalition, Yilmaz’s Motherland Party and the True Path Party of former Prime Minister Tansu Ciller, supposedly share secular, free-market values. But they are at each other’s throats over allegations of corruption and incompetence.

*

Apart from approving the budget, parliament has passed no important domestic laws since it convened in January. Important appointments have been delayed for weeks.

Tuesday’s decision could hardly have come at a more inconvenient time. Turkey is already slipping backward on many fronts, including trade integration with the European Union, its struggle with Russia over routes of future oil pipelines from the Caspian Sea and tension with the Arab world over a military-cooperation agreement with Israel.

Turks have become accustomed to uncertainty, and the private-sector economy is still booming. But there has been some violence recently.

Exploiting the vacuum in the government, radical Marxist youths took over an Istanbul parade on May Day. After three of them were killed--apparently by police--the youths rioted.