ISTANBUL, 10 July — Ailing and alone, Turkish Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit defied pressure to step down yesterday after a string of top-level resignations continued and early elections loomed.
Three more Cabinet ministers — Education Minister Metin Bostancioglu and state ministers Hasan Gemici and Mustafa Yilmaz — as well as nine other deputies from Ecevit’s Democratic Left Party resigned yesterday. One legislator, however, quickly returned to the party.
The departures raised to 33 the number of MPs who have deserted Ecevit from a party that only had 128 members in the 550-seat Parliament.
Six Cabinet ministers have quit Ecevit’s DSP in two days in protest at the 77-year-old premier’s refusal to heed public pressure to relinquish power due to protracted ill health that has left him unable to work.
Ecevit named replacements for three of the posts, but steadfastly refused to make any comment on the government’s future or appear in public.
Opposition leader Tansu Ciller said he had told her yesterday that he “had not yet come to the point of resignation”.
But early elections now seem inevitable. Junior coalition partner and Motherland Party leader Mesut Yilmaz yesterday called for a new government.
Ecevit’s major coalition partner, the Nationalist Action Party (MHP), is already lobbying for polls on Nov. 3. The group is expected to have collected the 110 signatures needed to recall Parliament from summer recess by today.
Polls held any later than September would almost certainly crush Turkey’s hopes of passing key legislation necessary to start accession talks with the European Union after the Copenhagen summit in December. “It’s back to square one with the EU,” ran the headline on the Radikal daily newspaper. “We should form a new government in order to pass the EU reforms before December,” said Yilmaz on television. “I think we owe this to next generations, if we can’t make it until December, it will cost the happiness and welfare of at least one generation.”
The odd left-right coalition which took power in 1999 has come to loggerheads a number of times over key human rights reforms demanded by the EU, including measures to allow broadcasting and education in Kurdish and to abolish the death penalty.
In Ankara, the staunchly secularist generals, an influential behind-the-scenes force, are likely worried by surveys which suggest that were elections held today, the big winner would be the Islamist Justice and Development Party and its youthful and widely popular leader Tayyip Erdogan. But any victory could prompt a confrontation with the military.
So far Ecevit has withstood widespread public pressure to name a successor and step down. The veteran politician was hospitalized in early May and has been unable to work since. (The Independent)
