Harmony Time for a Poet-Warrior

About the last thing that Turkey needed was another ineffectual coalition government. But that is what Turkey may get.

It had been an extraordinarily bloody two-month campaign in which 50 people died--36 of them in a May Day rally in Istanbul's principal square (TIME, May 16). In the end, 15.3 million voters went to the polls last week and chose another electoral standoff. The left-of-center Republican People's Party of urbane, hawk-nosed Buelent Ecevit, 52, which had been out of power since 1974, won 213 seats--13 short of a majority in the 450-member National Assembly. The conservative Justice Party of incumbent Prime Minister Sueleyman Demirel, 53, won 189 seats and has an outside chance of staying in office if Ecevit cannot form a government. With a salute to "people's power," a smiling Ecevit declared himself "ready and willing to accept the responsibility of forming a government." Demirel, though, refused to concede. "I do not accept defeat," he growled, "because there is no winner." The two leaders hate each other, and throughout the ugly campaign, each of the rival parties accused the other of crimes ranging from anarchy to thievery.

Healthy Dollops. Both leaders had hoped to get an absolute majority, thereby ending a seven-year period in which Turkey has been misruled by a succession of unstable coalitions, most of them led by military puppets or the durable, conservative Demirel. Internally, the country has been ravaged not only by periodic political disorders but by raging inflation (annual rate: 25%). Turkey has been straining to transform itself into a modern industrial state along Western lines, but the direction has yet to be determined. Demirel favors a traditional free-enterprise approach; Ecevit, although no Marxist, believes in a labor-oriented, guided economy with healthy dollops of social welfare.

Domestic issues loomed larger than foreign policy ones in the campaign, but the indecisive outcome has serious implications for the entire eastern Mediterranean and the NATO alliance. Turkey and Greece have come close to war in recent years over oil rights in the Aegean. They are still locked in a bitter dispute over Cyprus, which has been a divided island since Turkish troops invaded it in 1974. Ecevit became "the hero of Cyprus" to his people by ordering the invasion (ostensibly to protect the Turkish-Cypriot minority). Yet many Greeks had hoped that he would win a respectable mandate. They figured that Ecevit, as a hawk on the Cyprus issue with proven credentials, could risk negotiations with Prime Minister Constantine Caramanlis--and concessions--more easily than Demirel. The Greeks' hope now is that the military will nudge the two big parties into a government of national unity, but Turks consider this unlikely.

Ecevit was clearly not about to seek that kind of accommodation with Demirel on his own. He is a poet-warrior who studied social psychology and Middle Eastern history at Harvard and wrote the words to his own campaign song, Harmony (sample verse: "Cloud to the sky, rain to the cloud, soil to the rain, how well in harmony"). After a huge celebratory party at the R.P.P.'s yellow stucco headquarters on Ankara's Farabi Street (once home of the Turkish intelligence agency), he plunged into talks to see whether he could form an effective government. His goal: getting promises either of abstention or of direct support from scattered independents and defectors from other parties. By week's end Ecevit had corralled five maverick votes and was conducting an "underground" search for more to hammer together a minority government. The alternative was a coalition with the National Salvation Party (24 seats), which Demirel was forced to take into the current government. The N.S.P. leader is Necmettin Erbakan, 51, a smug hard-liner who insists that Turkey made a "concession" on Cyprus by not occupying the entire island. Commented Justice Party Deputy Nuri Bayar with a bitter smile: "We could wind up in a tug of war over a politician that neither side wants. That's the Oriental side of Turkish politics."

Some U.S. diplomats predicted that Ecevit, who despises Erbakan's erratic ways and irresponsible politics, might accept the Salvationists as allies, but then ignore them. Washington is uncertain about what an Ecevit government will mean for still strained Turkish-U.S. relations. Meeting newsmen last week, Ecevit warned that the continuation of a Congress-imposed embargo on military aid to Turkey will have "certain inevitable impacts on [our] contribution to the collective security system." He spoke vaguely of forming a new "national defense concept" that "need not be in conflict with our membership in NATO." Ecevit did not spell it out, but he seemed to be indicating that Turkey could play a lesser military role in NATO and could reduce its dependence on U.S. arms by shopping elsewhere.

Legal Communists. Assuming that he can round up those vital 13 votes, Ecevit will initially devote most of his energies to domestic matters. His first priorities, he said, would be restoring law-and-order and patching up the ailing economy. He intends to push for wage restraints, less generous commodity subsidies and increased export production. As for his law-and-order promises, Ecevit raised a few eyebrows by saying that he planned to legalize Turkey's small Communist Party (perhaps 2,000 members) by introducing legislation to repeal penal-code provisions that outlaw "class struggle." He also promised to seek a political amnesty, "since we don't accept the principle of crimes of opinion." Ecevit carefully exempted crimes of violence, however. He is aware that many of the 250 leftist criminals in Turkish prisons are there not for what they thought, but for rioting, arson and murder.

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