Electorate in Turkey Has Overriding Goal -- Change

ANKARA, Turkey -- Omer Kaptan was a farmer. But fertilizer prices climbed too high, so he left his land and moved to the city, where he sold pots and pans on the streets until the economy collapsed last year and workers from peddlers to bankers lost their jobs.

These days, Kaptan strolls a poor neighborhood of illegal shanties hammered into a hillside here on the outskirts of Turkey’s capital. There are wilting cabbage piles and chimney smoke and women knitting in the sun. Cats and children pick through garbage. And a man rants in the road -- his neighbors shaking their heads -- because he has no way to feed his family.

“There’s no work in this country. We’re finished,” said the 55-year-old Kaptan, a sturdy man with a graying beard. “The number of coffee shops increased because of all the unemployed. They sit with nothing to do. Husbands and wives are quarreling. Even at my age, I am quarreling with my wife.

“Look,” he said, reaching into his pocket and pulling out the equivalent of 60 cents. “This is all I have for my 10 children.”

Disillusionment and anger are expected to sweep the current government from power in Sunday’s national elections. Turks want new faces to staunch the worst economic crisis since World War II.

Leading the polls is the Justice and Development Party, or AKP, whose populist appeal and Islamic roots are a troubling sign for many, especially the military, that Turkey’s deeply avowed secularism is under threat.

The AKP bills itself as a westward-leaning party with a commitment to democratic principles. It has captured 30% support in recent surveys and leads a field of 18 parties. Running second with nearly 20% in the polls is the Republican People’s Party, or CHP, with its charismatic economic reformer, Kemal Dervis. Many analysts predict that the AKP and CHP will enter a coalition government. Such a scenario would please the military, which views the latter as an ideal counterbalance to Islamic influence.

But nearly a third of voters polled have said they are undecided, making it difficult to predict what influence the rising popularity of radical groups such as the Young Party, which is promising free education and free land, will have on the outcome. Young Party leader Cem Uzan, whose family owns the nation’s second-largest mobile phone company, is facing racketeering changes in the U.S. for allegedly defaulting on nearly $3 billion in loans from Nokia and Motorola.

“I haven’t made up my mind yet. We don’t trust any of these guys,” said Hatice Kucuk, sitting with other women in Kaptan’s shantytown. “They’re all the same.”

One thing is clear: Turks want to purge their government of old coalitions and the political corruption that has infected this nation of more than 65 million for decades. While many voting for the AKP are choosing it for religious reasons, most Turks just want something different. The AKP logo of a light bulb and its feisty leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, have capitalized on the desire for change, even if the party has been vague on prescriptions for reducing a $200-billion national debt and leading the country toward its long cherished dream of entering the European Union.

The military is watching closely. The protector of secularism in a country that’s 97% Muslim, the military forced an Islamic party from power in 1997. Since modern Turkey’s founding by Kemal Ataturk in 1923, the military and special police, often accused of human rights abuses, have been battling Islamists for the nation’s soul. Erdogan, the former mayor of Istanbul, was jailed several years ago for reciting a poem that read, “Minarets are our bayonets.... Mosques are our barracks.”

But the ruined economy -- with an unofficial 20% unemployment rate and $16 billion in loans from the West -- is proving a more immediate threat. The national intelligence service recently urged television stations to limit the airing of celebrity magazine shows featuring wealth and baubles. The government said such programs were “causing deep reactions among the masses who are in economic crisis.”

When asked how much money she earned for a fashion shoot, a model replied: “If I told you, there’d be a social implosion.”

The nation’s economic woes are propelling the AKP in the polls. Discontent is so strong that Prime Minster Bulent Ecevit’s Party of the Democratic Left is not expected to win 10% of the vote, the minimum required to hold seats in parliament.

“If the AKP comes to power,” Kaptan said, “Turkey will enter the European Union and I’ll be able to go to Europe and find a job.”

Most political analysts don’t regard this election as the watershed Turkey needs to overhaul a history of government inefficiency, patronage and strong military influence. No party or politician is seen as possessing the skills to clean up the bureaucracy, stop torture and human rights abuses in the ethnic Kurdish southeast, and quickly lift Turkey into the fold of the West. But an AKP victory, according to politicians and analysts, could trigger the beginning of social change and more emphasis on democracy.

“This election is not only driven by anger and dissent,” said Dogu Ergil, director of the Center for Research on Societal Problems. “It’s about a search for a new social contract that will allow religious and other groups more breathing space.... The AKP’s challenge will be to contain its radicals and religious extremists. They must suppress this, or it could threaten the party and the government.”

The party’s officials acknowledge that they must tread gingerly, especially with regard to issues such as the ban on wearing Islamic head scarves in public buildings. The debate has roiled for years and has domestic and international ramifications for a nation that straddles East and West.

Lifting the head-scarf ban could be considered a welcome step toward more democratic freedoms. But it also could be interpreted as an Islamic victory at a time when a wary Europe is considering Turkey for EU membership and the U.S. is lining up allies for a possible war against Iraq.

“Turkey’s a democratic country. There’s some question marks about that, but we are,” said Reha Denemec, one of the AKP’s founding members. “We don’t think of the head scarf in terms of religious elements. It’s a human rights question. Seventy-six percent of Turks want to solve the head-scarf issue.”

Bilge Dogan is one of them.

Shopping the other day outside the Haci Bayram Mosque, Dogan, with only her hands and face visible, stopped near a vendor selling prayer beads.

“The AKP will bring me freedom to wear my head scarf,” she said. “I haven’t been able to study at university for six years because they banned the head scarf. I would have liked to have been an engineer.”

Such talk worries Turks like Husayin Alakus, an unemployed truck driver with three children.

“The AKP is going to turn Turkey into Iran,” said Alakus, who is voting for the Young Party. “Why should we let them do that?”

Turkey’s leading Jewish industrialist, Ishak Alaton, said he doesn’t believe the AKP wants to create an Islamic state.

“They don’t have a grandiose project to change the basic elements of society,” he said. “They have proof of what they’ll risk.... Tayyip Erdogan has been trying to give the right messages to certain forces, including the Jewish lobby.”

Despite being the party’s energetic touchstone, Erdogan most likely would not have a place in an AKP government. His 1998 conviction on religious sedition has banned him from parliament and from serving as prime minister. Federal prosecutors are attempting to have him removed as party chairman.

The AKP was formed in 2001 when the Islamic Virtue Party split over disagreements between moderates and religious hard-liners.

Erdogan, who in the mid-1990s opposed Turkey’s entry into the EU, brought together young, Western-educated professionals to widen the AKP’s appeal to secularists and to the U.S. and Europe, both crucial for improving Turkey’s economy and stock market.

The last Islamic party to come to power was the Welfare Party. The military forced its collapse in 1997 because of fears that it was steering Turkey toward the Middle East instead of Europe.

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Special correspondent Amberin Zaman contributed to this report.