ANKARA, Nov 4: Turkey’s main pro-religion party was laying plans on Monday to form a new government after a spectacular election win that left it in solid control of the secular nation’s parliament.

Voters disenchanted with months of political chaos and the worst recession since World War II on Sunday handed a landslide win to the novice Justice and Development Party (AK), the first party in the nation’s history ever to have an outright majority in parliament.

With all ballots counted, the Anatolia news agency said AK had won 34.2 per cent or 363 of 550 parliamentary seats, leaving it in the driver’s seat to form Turkey’s first single-party government in more than a decade.

Outgoing Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit saw his three-party coalition wiped off the map as voters dumped the ruling political establishment from power without a single seat.

The AK moved to reassure nervous Western allies but faces suspicion it is hiding an agenda — a concern heightened now that it could hold the two-thirds majority needed to amend the secular constitution.

The powerful army, a cornerstone of NATO and crucial to US war plans in Iraq, forced a government from power five years ago and will have strong reservations about AK, founded just last year.

“Social explosion at the ballot box,” the Hurriyet newspaper headlined. But Radikal daily warned: “Turkey may have achieved ‘one-party rule’, one of the main conditions for political stability, but a majority of the votes are not represented in parliament. “There is a legitimacy crisis,” it said.

AK leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a controversial figure barred from office because of a 1998 conviction for sedition, insisted his party would keep Turkey in line with the West and on track for EU membership.

“The first thing we will do will be to accelerate the EU process,” the charismatic 48-year-old told NTV news channel.

Erdogan served four months of a 10-month term in 1998 for reciting a poem at a rally which ran: “Mosques are our barracks, the minarets our bayonets, the domes our helmets and the believers our soldiers.”—AFP