Erdogan set to take over as Turkey’s PM

The Turkish press on Monday hailed the 49-year-old politician’s victory, which was a final hurdle to his return to politics after he was slapped with a political ban for reciting a poem with political undertones in a 1997 rally in Siirt. "Siirt pays back its debt: Erdogan is in parliament," the Aksam daily said. "He (Erdogan) went away with a poem and came back like a poem," read the Yeni Safak daily. It is not yet clear when Erdogan will take over from current Prime Minister Abdullah Gul, who has been heading the government since the AKP — a movement with Islamist roots — shot to power on a landslide victory in the November elections, but observers say it could be as early as Tuesday or Wednesday.
Following the publication of the official results of the Siirt vote, Erdogan needs to be sworn in. Gul, for his part, has already indicated that he will step down.
In a television interview following Sunday’s vote, Erdogan said he planned to come up with a new cabinet list, which needs to be approved by the president before the government faces a vote of confidence in parliament.
One of the first questions to be tackled by the new government will be a decision on whether to call again on parliament to authorise the deployment of US troops in Turkey in preparation for war on Iraq.
In early March, the AKP-dominated parliament rejected a request to allow 62,000 US soldiers to use Turkey as a springboard to invade Iraq from the north, hampering Washington’s war plans and jeopardising bilateral ties.
The vote also blocked Ankara’s plans to send Turkish soldiers to northern Iraq to keep check on the region’s breakaway Kurds, which it suspects of entertaining separatist aims.
But Erdogan said on Sunday that he would not rush the matter and hinted that Ankara wanted new guarantees from Washington before going ahead with the request.