ANKARA: The admission of veteran Turkish premier Bulent Ecevit to hospital on Friday will feed speculation about his health and early polls that has already hit markets in a country struggling out of financial hardship.

Ecevit, ill at home for two weeks, was driven to an Ankara hospital where doctors, diagnosing a vascular condition in his left leg and a cracked rib, said he would stay at least a week.

Markets fell five percent on fears his condition could undermine a frail three-party government and derail reforms. Talk of early polls raises horror for some, hope for others.

Abdullah Gul, top member of the opposition AK party, sees polls near. “The fruit is about ripe,” he said, cupping his hands as if to weigh the yield. “It is ready to fall from the tree.”

Dates from late this summer to next spring are bandied about in expansive press articles about the 76-year-old premier.

But it is not just opposition and media toying publicly with what had long been in government circles a heretical notion.

Economy Minister Kemal Dervis, who has had his share of clashes with rightist Nationalist Action Party (MHP) colleagues over tough IMF-backed financial reforms, caused a stir this month by saying the frail three-party government should set a date for polls. He was, in effect, telling Ecevit his vow to see his term through to April, 2004 was unrealistic.

Dervis, a senior World Banker summoned home from Washington to help rescue the country from financial crisis early last year, says setting a date for elections, far from being a risk, may ease uncertainty over implementation of difficult measures.

“Technically, we’ve put in place all macroeconomic decisions and balances,” a source close to Dervis said. “We now move on to micro-economic details and for this we must end uncertainty.”

He said election thinking had already taken a hold among some elements of the government embracing Ecevit’s Democratic Left Party (DSP), the MHP and the conservative Motherland Party.

For example, he said, one rightist minister who had joined a general agreement to shut down regional directorates of a state organisation as part of manpower cutbacks, had withdrawn his signature. —Reuters