Front-Runner Looks Only Ahead

“You cannot be secular and Muslim at the same time. With Allah’s blessings, our rebellion will begin.”

Those words, uttered six years ago at a party rally here by the man who has emerged as Turkey’s most popular politician, have come back to haunt him as the influential armed forces intensify a campaign to stamp out political Islam.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the charismatic former mayor of Istanbul, insists that time has tempered his views.

“The world has changed, and so have I,” he told The Times last week during his first interview with a Western newspaper since he launched a new political party last month. “I am not an Islamic politician. My party does not want a religion-based state.”

But it is Turkey’s militantly secular generals and their allies in the judicial, media and business worlds whom Erdogan will need to convince if he is to make a bid for the premiership of this predominantly Muslim but officially secular nation of 65 million people. And he has vowed to make that run.

Elections are officially scheduled for 2003, but most analysts predict that they will be held next year.

Turkey boasts the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s second-largest army. The armed forces have seized power three times over the last four decades, and they continue to describe Islamic radicalism as the chief threat to more than 70 years of rigidly secular rule introduced by the founder of modern Turkey, Kemal Ataturk.

Erdogan’s political future, analysts say, could have far-reaching implications for Turkey’s still-struggling democracy as the country strives to achieve its long-cherished goal of membership in the European Union.

“If he is given the green light, you could say that the forces that have always sought to influence which party or leader should be allowed to take part in politics are now willing to allow voters to make that choice,” said Kemal Can, a respected political analyst.

The generals, self-appointed custodians of Ataturk’s legacy, played a pivotal role in 1997 in unseating Turkey’s first Islamist government. Then-Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan was banned from politics for five years, and his Welfare Party was outlawed on charges of seeking to introduce Islamic rule during a turbulent year in office.

Most Turks regard the military as their most reliable and trustworthy institution and their chief guarantee against political violence.

In a further setback for political Islam, Virtue, the party in which the Islamists regrouped, was banned in June. Its chief offense consisted of seeking to have a female lawmaker become the first clad in an Islamic-style head scarf to take the oath of office.

Erdogan seized the opportunity to woo away about 50 former Virtue deputies and set up his own party. Meanwhile, 48 other former Virtue lawmakers loyal to Erbakan formed their own party, Felicity.

Tellingly, both Erdogan and the Felicity Party leader, Recai Kutan, were not invited to the generals’ annual cocktail party Thursday to mark Victory Day.

Erdogan, a tall and muscular 47-year-old, labels himself a conservative democrat.

“Our movement embraces all Turks, be they pious or atheist, right-wing or Communist, and our victory is imminent,” he said.

In fact, recent polls show that Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party could take as much as 30% of the vote if parliamentary elections were held today, while its pro-secular rivals, discredited by allegations of sleaze and incompetence, would fail to muster the votes necessary to win any seats.

But already there are ominous signs that Erdogan will not be allowed to run.

Last month, Turkey’s chief prosecutor, Sabih Kanadoglu, asked the country’s highest court to remove Erdogan from the leadership of his party. Kanadoglu cited Erdogan’s 1998 conviction on charges of provoking racial and religious hatred by reading a nationalist poem--taught in public schools--at a rally. Erdogan was forced to step down as mayor of Istanbul and barred from politics for life, and in 1999 he served four months in prison.

The high court is expected to take up the prosecutor’s petition Thursday and issue a verdict within a week. If it upholds Kanadoglu’s views, Erdogan will be barred from running.

Erdogan asserts that his offenses were expunged under a controversial amnesty law passed last year.

“I have no fears. I am fully respectful of the Turkish Constitution, and I need nobody’s permission to serve the Turkish people,” he said with typical defiance.

One of Erdogan’s greatest advantages is that he remains untested in national government.

“The others did nothing for us,” said Metin Basaran, an unemployed Istanbul waiter, echoing widespread sentiment among the urban poor. “I will vote for Erdogan because he seems honest and he’s someone new.”

Erdogan’s populist rhetoric--his speeches are liberally peppered with references to justice and bread for the people--sounds especially appealing as Turkey grapples with the worst economic crisis in its modern history.

More than half a million people have lost their jobs this year, the Turkish lira has shed more than half its value, and the economy has shrunk by a record 11%.

Erdogan speaks no foreign languages, and many observers question his ability to run Turkey. During the interview, he strongly criticized the government’s plan to rescue the economy but offered no alternative.

Still, even his harshest critics acknowledge that during his four-year stint as mayor of Istanbul, he did an excellent job.

The mainstream Turkish press, however, remains largely hostile to Erdogan, a former professional soccer player who studied to become an Islamic cleric before earning a management degree at an Istanbul college. It was during his student years that he joined the Islamic movement after falling under the spell of Erbakan.

Last month, a private TV station broadcast footage--said to have been leaked by the national intelligence service--showing Erdogan making fiery anti-secular pronouncements during his now-infamous 1995 speech. Pro-secular columnists have followed that lead, reprinting other incriminating statements, such as “Democracy is a means to an end” and “We do not want to join the European Union, [whose] real name is the Catholic Christian States’ Union.”

Today, Erdogan says that EU membership and bolstering Turkey’s democracy and economy are his party’s primary goals. Religion, he says, is a personal issue that has no place in politics. And he breezily dismisses the bans at government offices and schools on the Islamic head scarf, worn by his wife and two daughters, as “a problem that will be resolved on its own.”

The danger of such talk is that it could cost him the votes of pious Turks, who form the backbone of his constituency and could defect to the rival Felicity Party.

“The people know exactly who I am and what I stand for,” said an apparently unfazed Erdogan. “Nothing can stop us now.”