World focuses on Turkey vote, future

Erdogan’s popularity — and Thursday’s explicit backing for the idea from Turkey’s respected military — may allow him to choose to let the United States to move in despite the solid opposition to war by those who will have voted for him and the opposition of virtually everyone else in the country.
Longer term, Erdogan will be tackling the challenge of a struggling economy, the problem that soured the electorate on his predecessors. The economy badly needs the billions in compensation the United States is offering for the damage war with Iraq would be sure to cause, as happened after the Gulf War.
Erdogan also must weigh the cost to his popularity of retaining U.S. backing for a resumption of International Monetary Fund aid, even though it is linked to increasingly unpopular reforms, especially in Erdogan’s home region of Siirt.
President Bush has pledged continued support of Turkey regardless, but opposition to the U.S. request for help is widely seen jeopardizing that support.
Turkey is already working for better terms of trade with Saudi Arabia, also experiencing difficulty accommodating the realities of the threatened U.S. attack on Iraq.
Even without war, Turkey’s fledgling democracy, especially its tradition of a secular government, is seen to be at stake. Erdogan’s ruling political party has Islamic roots in a country where religion has traditionally been separated from government.
Ir remains to be seen whether a second parliamentary vote on U.S. troops on Turkish soil has a better chance of passage, particularly if a U.S. war on Iraq is already under way by the time of reconsideration. Yet the odds are already seen tipped in favor of new result by Thursday’s explicit military backing which had been absent in the first vote.
The military is arguing that cooperation with the United States could bolster Turkey’s influence on any post-war containment of northern Iraq’s Kurdish aspirations, perhaps without firing a shot.
Since Erdogan requires a seat in Parliament in order to serve as Prime Minister, the by-election for that seat could open the way for him to replace as head of state his deputy in the Justice and Development Party, Abdulla Gul. Erdogan has been assumed to be making the decisions anyway for four months since his party swept into power.
Parliament amended the constitution to allow him to run for a seat representing the southeastern province of Sirt. Voting irregularities had spoiled the original election.