Turkish leader finally gains seat in landslide victory

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the leader of Turkey's ruling party, has finally won the parliamentary seat he badly needs to restore his authority over a government shaken by the defeat of plans to admit 62,000 US troops bound for Iraq.

With the count in outlying villages still to come in, he won a landslide 85 per cent share of the vote yesterday among the residents of this ancient and dusty town, surrounded by the snow-capped mountains of the country's impoverished south-eastern region.

Mr Erdogan's constituency victory paves the way for him to assume the premiership in the coming week. Though expected, it will be greeted with undisguised relief by a Bush administration optimistic that Mr Erdogan will use his formal arrival in government to persuade the Ankara parliament to reverse its narrow decision nine days ago to refuse the US the use of Turkish bases to open its northern front against Saddam Hussein.

In return, the US had offered Turkey, which is in talks with the International Monetary Fund about the country's economic crisis, $6bn (£3.75bn) in direct grants and an extensive loan guarantee package.

Having been in power but not in office, Mr Erdogan has found it difficult since last November to run a sometimes divided government from the headquarters of his Justice and Development Party (AKP), when he cannot even attend debates in parliament.

It probably made it more difficult for him last week to persuade the stubborn Turkish Cypriot leader, Rauf Denktash, to back a UN reunification plan which Kofi Annan will urge on leaders of the divided island at a meeting in The Hague today.

As a result, the influence wielded by the 119,000 constituents of this mainly Kurdish and Arab town can hardly be overestimated. Some analysts believe Mr Erdogan was inhibited from making clearer public statements in favour of the US request before the Siirt poll by worries that it might alienate a predominantly religious Muslim population opposed to war and fearful any counter attack by President Saddam would directly affect the town, which is a mere 60 miles from the Iraqi border.

The district was also a focus of guerrilla activity by Kurdish PKK militants until the mid-1990s and its successor organisation, Kadek, hinted it would fight again if Turkish troops march on Kurds in northern Iraq – a prospect equally horrifying to non-militant Kurds.

Perhaps as a result of his earlier disinclination to sell the prospective deal with the US, many voters here remain convinced that Mr Erdogan does not want war, while also being bleakly realistic about the pressures on him to grant the US request. Outside the polling station of the Mehmetik Ilkogretim primary school, Guleser Nar, a woman voter and one of the minority prepared to be named in interviews under the watchful eyes of local police, said: "None of us want war, but Erdogan has to give permission because of the economy."

But many other voters were uninhibited in saying the main reason for their support was the hope that, as Prime Minister, Mr Erdogan would bring investment to a town visibly blighted by poverty and unemployment. One woman, Hatice Altunc, said: "We have to give this new party a try. It is good to have a Prime Minister here. We need employment, infrastructure and a university."

The potential costs of war have confounded fears about the economy. At the Siirt Lisesi secondary school, Mahmoud Konour, a jeweller, said: "Normally, Erdogan would be opposed to war but he has obligations . We have borrowed a lot of money from the US and we have to do what they say."

Myhdi Toprak, an unemployed engineer, said: "Why is Britain supporting the war? The British government has the power to refuse but Turkey doesn't because of the state of the economy." He said he had voted for the AKP but "with less excitement than last time" because the government had failed to live up to its promises of transforming Turkey.

Several voters who had supported the AKP, with varying enthusiasm, said – in carefully oblique terms because of the sensitivity of the subject – that they looked to his non-fundamentalist Islamist party to do more to allow the wearing of headscarves by Muslim public officials and students. These have been banned by all the fiercely secularist governments up till now. Despite fears that the heavy presence of plain clothes and armed police close to polling stations was intended to enforce the normally theoretical compulsory voting regime here, other voters readily admitted they were joining a boycott called by the Kurdish Dehap grouping, which came top of the poll here in last November's elections, but failed to qualify for parliamentary seats because it fell short of the required 10 per cent share of the nationwide vote.