Turkey’s Lucky Incumbent Premier Favored to Win National Elections

“Welcome, welcome, our brave prime minister!” chanted thousands of Turks assembled for a recent campaign rally in this Mediterranean resort city. “Let the ones who don’t love you die!”

The man they came to hear is an unlikely hero. Bulent Ecevit, 73, was often dismissed as a political has-been when the top government job fell into his lap three months ago after a bribery scandal brought down his predecessor. But he has since soared to the top of opinion polls and is favored to finish first in national elections today.

Throughout the country, Turks are voting for municipal councils and a new parliament. The leader of the party with the most parliament seats usually is chosen by the president to form the government.

The only serious rival to Ecevit’s Party of the Democratic Left is the Islamist movement that won Turkey’s last elections, in 1995, but then relinquished power under pressure from the armed forces. But even if the Islamists were to win again, they would stand almost no chance of leading the next government because of continued opposition by the military.

That leaves Ecevit, a self-effacing university dropout, former journalist and Sanskrit scholar who has been in politics 42 years, as the reborn darling of Turkey’s pro-secular establishment.

In recent years, corruption scandals and fierce struggles between secularists and Islamists have produced a string of weak governments in Turkey, a predominantly Muslim nation whose stability is important to both the United States and Europe.

A member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Turkey joined the Western alliance against neighboring Iraq in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Allied warplanes use a NATO base in southern Turkey to enforce a “no-fly” zone over Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, and Turkish jets are taking part in NATO bombing raids on Yugoslavia.

Few analysts, however, believe that today’s elections will yield a stable government. No party, Ecevit’s included, commands enough support to come to power alone.

“The most likely outcome of the elections,” said Alan Makovsky, a Turkey expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, “will be a three- or four-party, right-left secular coalition government under the incumbent prime minister.”

Ecevit’s resurgent popularity after years of relative obscurity--his party finished fourth in the last elections--owes as much to chance as it does to the paucity of new leaders whom voters can choose from.

His latest break came in January, when Mesut Yilmaz, then his partner in a center-left coalition, resigned amid charges of helping a business crony acquire a state-owned bank.

Backed by one of Yilmaz’s conservative rivals, Ecevit got the nod to form an interim, minority government and lead Turkey to elections. It is his first stint as prime minister since the 1970s, when he held the job three times.

Ecevit was the beneficiary of another windfall Feb. 15, when Turkish special forces arrested Turkey’s most wanted fugitive, Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan, and flew him home from Kenya. The prime minister announced the arrest and got much of the credit at home.

Ecevit’s supporters nickname him karaoglan, or “dusky boy,” because of his dark eyes and dyed black hair. Placards at his rally read “Welcome Kenya’s Conqueror.” His hard line against ethnic Kurds’ demands for self-rule in southeastern Turkey has boosted his ratings among Turks.

Above all, though, it is Ecevit’s reputation for probity that has reignited his electoral fortunes.

With his threadbare clothes, old-world courtesy and passion for poetry, Ecevit, a native of the Black Sea mining town of Zonguldak, stands in sharp contrast to his scandal-tainted secularist rivals. He shuns an official Mercedes-Benz and the opulent prime minister’s residence in favor of a locally assembled Renault and his tiny house in a middle-class Ankara suburb.

“He never ate other people’s bread. He is the only honest one among this bunch of robbers,” said Hamza Cobanoglu, a villager from just outside Ankara, who said he would vote for Ecevit.

The prime minister wasn’t so popular in Washington during his first term in office, when he ordered Turkey’s 1974 military invasion of the island of Cyprus. The fighting provoked a confrontation with NATO neighbor Greece and has left Cyprus partitioned to this day between ethnic Greek and Turkish sectors.

But U.S. officials say they now enjoy a “smooth working relationship” with Ecevit, particularly on Iraq.

When he was outside the government, Ecevit was shrilly opposed to the U.S.-led, Turkish-based allied air patrol over northern Iraq. Its “real mission,” he said, was to oversee the establishment of an independent Kurdish state in Iraq, which would, in turn, encourage similar aspirations by Turkey’s Kurdish minority.

After becoming prime minister this year, however, he turned down Iraqi demands to have the allied mission kicked out of Turkey.

These days, Ecevit has nothing but praise for Washington.

“The United States has understood the strategic importance of Turkey following the collapse of the bipolar world,” he said in a recent interview.

“More to the point, it is Ecevit who has accepted the importance of America,” a Western diplomat in Turkey said.