Turkish high court voids vote

The political crisis in Turkey deepened Tuesday when the high court annulled parliament’s initial round of voting for president, crippling the ruling party’s efforts to install a onetime Islamist in a post occupied by secularists since the founding of the republic.

The ruling Justice and Development Party said late Tuesday that it would seek to move up elections to choose a new parliament as a way to break the deadlock. Voting could take place as soon as June 24, nearly five months ahead of schedule.

The dispute has laid bare long-running tensions in a country with an overwhelmingly Muslim population but a strong secular tradition. It also has raised painful questions about national identity, the viability of Turkey’s democratic institutions and the country’s desire to align itself with the West.

The political turmoil came against the backdrop of violent May Day demonstrations in Istanbul that, although unrelated to the presidential dispute, added to a growing sense of chaos. With wide-eyed tourists looking on, riot police plunged into groups of protesters in the city’s main square, wielding truncheons and dousing demonstrators with water cannons and pepper spray. As many as 700 people were arrested and hundreds reported injured.

The televised scenes of police beating unarmed demonstrators mortified those Turks who are concerned about the country’s international image as it presses ahead with what has become a faltering bid to join the European Union.

Door not closed

Turkey’s parliament is charged with filling the presidency. The post carries limited powers, but the holder is seen as the heir to Kemal Ataturk, the country’s revered founding father. The president can veto laws and is, in title at least, the commander in chief of the army.

Despite the court decision, the ruling party still could push ahead with its efforts to have its presidential candidate, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, elected by parliament in a series of votes that originally were scheduled to have taken place over the next two weeks.

The Justice and Development Party dominates the 550-seat chamber and can easily muster the simple majority required to elect Gul. However, opposition parties last week managed to prevent a quorum of 367 members from being present for a preliminary vote. That was the basis for Tuesday’s ruling by the Constitutional Court annulling the initial proceedings.

Party officials said a new first-round vote in parliament would be held Thursday, but acknowledged that the opposition could boycott that ballot as well, extending the stalemate. A date for early general elections, though, could be set as soon as today.

Polls suggest the ruling party would perform strongly if new elections were held. The party, which has its roots in political Islam but today describes its agenda as conservative democratic, is well organized at the grass-roots level and probably could cope better with a speeded-up election timetable than some of its secular opponents.

“If all parties are sincere about early elections, we can do whatever is required,” said government spokesman Cemil Cicek. “After all, we are serving the people.”

Secularists alarmed

The battle over who will accede to the presidency burst into the open last month when the ruling party appeared poised to name Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan as its candidate.

Erdogan, an observant Muslim, has been lauded during his four-year tenure for presiding over strong economic growth. But he also alarmed secularists by trying to criminalize adultery and by seeking to ease the ban on Islamic head scarves in government offices and schools.

In an effort to defuse the confrontation, the party last week named Gul instead as its presidential candidate. He also is devout but is considered more moderate than Erdogan. In addition, he is a highly respected diplomat who has worked assiduously to cultivate ties with the West.

But Gul too has drawn the ire of secularists, who fear that anyone the ruling party picks eventually will try to erode Turkey’s constitutionally mandated separation of Islam and state. Demonstrations over the last 2 1/2 weeks in the capital, Ankara, and in Istanbul drew hundreds of thousands of participants, some of whom waved red national flags and shouted, “Turkey is secular and will stay that way!”

Adding to the complex mix of factors at play, the country’s powerful military, which considers itself the guardian of the secular system devised by Ataturk, issued a pair of strongly worded warnings that the president must uphold secular principles, or else it would intervene. The military has unseated four governments in the last half a century, the last one only a decade ago.

Many secularists in Turkey applauded the military for lending what they considered to be much-needed muscle to their efforts to block the Justice and Development Party from gaining the presidency and consolidating its hold on both the executive and legislative branches of government. But the European Union expressed unease about the army’s degree of influence in political affairs.

Gul, in an appearance Tuesday night on national television, sidestepped questions about whether pushing ahead with his candidacy might trigger a military coup.

“There may be those who want me and others who don’t,” he said. “I have been Turkey’s foreign minister for 4 1/2 years. There are not many people in Turkey who can be trusted if I can’t be.”

Clashes in Istanbul

As the Constitutional Court was deliberating, May Day demonstrators in central Istanbul fought running battles with police.

Thousands of police officers were deployed, lining up along the city’s main pedestrian thoroughfare in long phalanxes, while helicopters whirled overhead. Riot-control vehicles bumped over cobblestones.

One cluster of demonstrators was chased down by club-wielding riot police near the five-star Marmara Hotel in Taksim Square, which is popular with business travelers and tourists. Three middle-aged female tourists from Sweden gaped in amazement as they emerged from the hotel just in time to see police bloody a longhaired young man with truncheons, then kick his prone body.

“This was a violation of our democratic rights,” said protester Fevzi Ozoglu, a pensioner whose eyes were streaming from tear gas.

In a side street off the square, a group of businessmen stepped out of an office building, chatting among themselves, just as police with helmets and riot shields chased a group of demonstrators past them. The businessmen paused, blinked, then turned and fled down the nearest alley.

A fish vendor bemoaned the effect of a drifting cloud of tear gas on his wares. “Ruined, ruined!” he said of his open-air display of mussels and sea bream.

With images of the street unrest shown on television worldwide, commentators fretted over what they characterized as an international black eye for Turkey. Concern for the country’s image in the eyes of the world also has been a theme in recent weeks amid the religious-secular tug of war over the presidency.

On Monday night, Erdogan gave a nationally televised speech in which he appealed for calm and unity, saying political disarray could harm Turkey’s booming economy. Istanbul’s main stock index has dropped sharply amid the unrest, and the national currency, the lira, also has lost ground.

king@latimes.com