Turkish Premier Asked to Form Coalition

The incumbent leftist prime minister, Bulent Ecevit, was asked Monday to form a new government amid renewed tensions between the country’s army-backed pro-secular establishment and its embattled Islamist minority.

“We will seek to form a government which will work in harmony,” said Ecevit, 73, after meeting with Turkish President Suleyman Demirel.

Ecevit’s Party of the Democratic Left placed first by a small margin in nationwide elections April 18. But it will need the support of at least two other parties to gain a parliamentary majority, leaving in question whether Turkey will have the political stability it sorely needs.

As the leader of the only left-wing group to have been elected to the new parliament, Ecevit faces tough choices in determining who his partners will be.

Given the current distribution of seats in the 550-member parliament, Ecevit’s most obvious choice is the ultranationalist but secular Nationalist Action Party, which more than doubled its share of the vote and finished second. The two parties are both hawkish on foreign policy, and both favor a military solution to the 15-year-long rebellion in the country’s largely Kurdish southeast.

Lingering ideological differences could complicate a deal. In the 1970s, the two sides engaged in daily street battles that claimed nearly 6,000 lives and resulted in the military’s intervention in Turkish politics in 1980.

Both parties since have moved closer to the political center, but they are sharply divided on secularism. The nationalists are in favor of lifting bans on the Islamic head scarf in state institutions and schools, and have vowed to push through legislation to that end.

Ecevit supports limiting use of the Islamic head scarf to non-official places, a position that has earned him crucial backing from Turkey’s powerful generals. The scarves are seen as a political statement challenging Turkey’s secular system.

During a stormy inaugural session of parliament on Sunday, the nationalists and two other pro-secular right-wing parties did not support Ecevit’s demand that a female Islamist lawmaker, who sought to take her oath wearing the Islamic head scarf, be dismissed from the chamber.

Ecevit and 135 members of his party stood up and shouted, “Out! Out!” when Merve Kavakci, who was elected on the Islamist Virtue Party ticket, appeared in the assembly wearing a navy blue scarf wrapped tightly around her head.

Kavakci, a U.S.-trained computer engineer, left the parliament premises without being sworn in.

On Monday, she accused Ecevit of violating “the basic principles of democracy and human rights.” Kavakci insisted that her head scarf was merely an expression of her religious beliefs.

Apparently unswayed by such claims, Turkey’s chief prosecutor, Vural Savas, began investigating whether Kavakci had violated rigid sedition laws by entering the parliament with her head covered. If tried and convicted, she could receive up to three years in prison. But Kavakci would have to be stripped of her parliamentary immunity before she could be tried.

The Virtue Party is already facing a possible ban for allegedly acting as the “continuation” of its predecessor party, which was proscribed last year after being accused of seeking to introduce Islamic rule. The Islamists’ ongoing standoff with the military is widely believed to have scared away voters who helped them win elections in 1995.