Party with Islamic roots holds early lead in Turkish elections

ANKARA, Turkey -- Turkish voters, angry over the country's slide into its worst economic crisis in decades, gave an early lead to a party with Islamic roots in Sunday's elections that were expected to completely reshape parliament in this key U.S. ally.

Early results showed Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit's Democratic Left Party faring so poorly that the premier was unlikely to retain his seat in parliament if the voting trend continued.

With 21.6 percent of the vote counted, the Justice and Development Party had 36 percent, the Anatolia news agency reported.

Its rival Republican People's Party held 20 percent of the vote and coming in second.

No other party had more than 10 percent, the threshold for taking seats in parliament.

The highly respected NTV news channel reported nearly identical results with about half of the votes counted. It was not immediately clear why there was such a discrepancy in the percentage of the vote counted.

That raised the possibility of the Justice party holding a parliamentary majority, able to form a government without coalition partners.

"The preliminary results show that we are ahead by a great margin," Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the leader of the Justice party said.

Growing tensions

The Justice party was established last year by lawmakers from a banned pro-Islamic party and has already sparked tensions with the staunchly secular establishment.

The early results came from polling stations throughout the country and were roughly consistent with results in pre-election polls.

The elections come amid the country's worst economic crisis in more than 50 years and voters had been expected to show little sympathy for Ecevit and his three-party coalition government.

The elections board banned Erdogan from standing as a candidate in the elections because of a jail sentence he served in 1999 for publicly reading a poem that a court said was anti-secular. A prosecutor is also trying to close Justice down, saying Erdogan cannot lead the party because of the conviction.

Justice has not specified who will serve as prime minister in the absence of Erdogan if it forms the next government.

The party has tried to distance itself from its Islamic roots, with some supporters calling it a "Muslim Democratic" party, after the Christian Democrats in Europe.

The party says it will concentrate on social welfare, support Turkey's $31 billion IMF-backed recovery program and has hinted that it would support a U.S.-led operation in Iraq if it has U.N. approval.

But many in the secular establishment are extremely wary of the party's Islamic roots and fear that it might clash with the staunchly secular military. Such instability would come as the United States considers war in neighboring Iraq and Turkey begins to recover from a crushing economic slump that has left 2 million unemployed.