Ruling Party in Turkey Wins Broad Victory

By SABRINA TAVERNISE

ISTANBUL, July 22 — The ruling party of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan won a broad victory in national parliamentary elections on Sunday, taking nearly half of the total vote in what became a referendum on the future of Turkish democracy.

Mr. Erdogan’s Justice and Development party took 47 percent of the vote, according to preliminary results, far more than the 34 percent the party received in the last election in 2002. The election result was a slap at the secular state establishment, which had predicted that voters would punish the party for trying to push an Islamic agenda.

But only a fifth of Turks seem to share that concern, with the Republican People’s Party, the main party of Turkey’s secular establishment, receiving 20 percent of the vote, up by 1 percentage point from the last election. The Nationalist Action Party, which that played on fears of ethnic Kurdish separatism, won 14 percent of the vote, election officials said.

Turkey is a NATO member and a strong American ally in a troubled region and its stability is crucial. Its current political soul-searching attempts to find answers to the questions that many Americans have been asking since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001: Can an Islamic-oriented government that is popularly elected be democratic and Westward-looking?

It was unclear on Sunday night how Turkey’s powerful and secular military might react, if at all. It issued a sharp warning to Mr. Erdogan’s party in April, saying it had strayed too far from secularism. It has deposed elected governments four times since the Turkish state was founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1923 and seemed to be threatening a fifth.

“I believe our democracy will emerge much stronger with this election,” said Mr. Erdogan, voting with his wife Emine in Istanbul, the Anatolian News Agency of Turkey reported. “This isn’t just a message to our country, but a message to the world.”

The struggle in Turkey is essentially one of power. Mr. Erdogan’s party, known in Turkish by its initials, A.K., derives its base in part from a religious, merchant class in rural Turkey. It has pushed hard to gain membership for Turkey in the European Union, rewriting laws to meet European standards and meeting requirements in an International Monetary Fund economic program. It has strengthened economic ties with Israel, and has broached the topic of Turkey’s long-festering problems with its Kurdish minority.

Still, secular, urban Turks are suspicious. The worldview of much of the senior leadership of Mr. Erdogan’s party differs substantially from their own. They recall Mr. Erdogan’s beginnings as an Islamist and say it is impossible to trust his party no matter what their current record is.

“The community that made Tayyip Erdogan who he is is the Islamic community,” said Nu Guvenmez, a gas industry employee who had cast his vote for the secular party in Istanbul. “He hasn’t broken ties. He can’t leave it.”

But some of that concern stems from a deep-rooted class divide. In an affluent neighborhood in Istanbul, members the A.K. party leadership, many of whose wives wear headscarves, were compared unfavorably to administrations in Syria, Lebanon and Jordan — countries with much less vibrant democracies than Turkey — because those wives were uncovered.

The election comes after three months of political uncertainty that followed a showdown over the nation’s presidency, leading to Sunday’s elections ahead of schedule.

Turkey’s secular state elite, backed by its military, used a legal maneuver in May to block Mr. Erdogan’s candidate from becoming president. Their objection was that the wife of the candidate, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, wears a Muslim headscarf.

The episode brought out strong emotions in Turks and deeply divided the nation.

Sebnem Arsu contributed reporting.