ANKARA: With the Turkish legislative elections coming up on Sunday, the picture of the post-July 22 National Assembly takes a firmer shape. The number of the parties to share the red leather chairs of the spacious modern building in the Bakanliklar neighbourhood of Ankara will be limited to three.

This was indicated by a poll from a reliable research institute, conducted between July 9 and 17 and published on Thursday. The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the Republican Peoples Party (CHP) are the current tenants of Meclis, the familiar name for the Parliament, and are given as sure to return.

But another guest is preparing to also move in. The Nationalist Action Party (MHP) is, by most estimates, likely to attract more than 10 per cent of the electorate and get a pass to the house of representatives.

Three parties will dominate the fate of 72 million Turks in the coming five-year legislature. Three political leaders will compete for shaping national and international policy in a country living with its domestic ghosts and worries, and surrounded by challengers, even among its close allies, in a turbulent part of the world.

The three men — yes, all three party leaders are men, in a country where women have since the 1920s civil and political rights equal to those of male citizens — are known to various degrees to readers interested in Eastern Mediterranean affairs.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, head of AKP, is without doubt a household name in Europe and Eurasia. But who could say that Bahceli or Baykal ring a bell?

Let’s go in reverse order of popularity.

Devlet Bahceli, 65, born in Osmaniye in Cilicia, now Cukurova, close to the Syrian border, spent his youth in Istanbul and Ankara. In 1987, he became a member of the board of the National Task Party (MCP), predecessor of MHP. After the death of Alparslan Turkes, leader of the party, Behceli became its chairman, and from 1999 to 2002 served as deputy prime minister under Bulent Ecevit in a coalition government comprising CHP, MHP, the Motherland Party (ANAP), and the pro-Islamist Virtue Party (FP).

MHP, quasi-absent from political life since 1983, scored a low 8.2 per cent in 1995, but qualified for Parliament in 1999 with 18 per cent, falling back to 8.4 per cent in the 2002 elections.

Deniz Baykal, 69, born in Antalya, on the Aegean coast, to a Caucasian father and Cretan-origin mother, is a veteran politician. After his studies of law in Ankara, Columbia and Berkley, he entered politics in 1973 as a member of parliament on a CHP ticket. Well-mannered and able navigator in the Turkish political waters, he served as minister for finance, energy, foreign affairs, and as deputy prime minister in various governments.

Appointed secretary general of CHP in 1998, he was elected head of the party in 2002, and has led it for the past 15 years with short interruptions in 1995 and 1999. His followers have rightly labelled him a survivor. His critics among CHP members and cadre complain of his abrasive position as a scaremonger against the religiously inclined parties, and for his views on international affairs, that seem to belong to a bygone era.

After the republic was restored in 1983 following the military coup of 1980, CHP ran into a series of electoral setbacks that excluded it from legislative activities. It succeeded in 1995 to get 10.7 per cent of the vote, just enough to receive a few seats in the hemicycle, ranking last among the five parties admitted.

However, in the 1999 poll it was again excluded, with a meagre score of 8.7 per cent. With the rise of the Islamist AKP, Kemalist voters awoke and the CHP obtained 19.4 per cent of the voices cast. CHP was founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and is still the bastion of uncompromising secularism in the country.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, 53, is, however, the most enigmatic, and for some the most fascinating, of these three gladiators of the Turkish political arena. His family, of modest Laz-Caucasian origin, moved in the 1950s from the region that borders Georgia to Kasimpasa, one of the poorest and toughest neighbourhoods of Istanbul.

His father, a shipping clerk who eventually became a ferry captain on the Bosporus, was conservative and had high ambitions for his children’s education. According to two of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s biographers, he once hung his young son from the ceiling as punishment for swearing.

At the age of 12, Recep Tayyip entered a religious high school preparing prayer-leaders, a deviation from Ataturk’s strictly secular education system introduced in the 1950s by then prime minister Adnan Menderes, who was overthrown by junior military officers in 1960 and hanged the next year. To buy books for his studies, Erdogan peddled bagels left over at bakeries and warmed up by his mother the following morning to look fresh.

He entered politics in 1970 at age 16, joining the just-founded National Order Party of Necmettin Erbakan, which two years later was renamed the National Salvation Party. He was a young activist, featuring an Islamist beard that barred his way towards professional football — a sport at which he apparently excelled. But, unlike other young members of the party, he managed to stay out of trouble during the politically violent 1970s.

When Turkey returned to democracy in 1983, he became a full-time politician in Erbakan’s new formation, the Welfare Party (RP). His ambition was to position Turkish Muslims as models for society through their behaviour and solidarity.

His tenure at the helm of the millenary city was successful. But in 1997, after reciting a poem dear to Muslims at a political meeting, he was accused together with other Islamists by the military for using religion to further political objectives, and was jailed for a few months. He lost the post of mayor and his political rights.

This adventure was a milestone in his political education. Out of prison, he displayed a firm character combined with moderation and political maturity. He had come to realise that in Turkey going against the secularist current and the Army was both futile and dangerous. His dialectic changed, and the span of his appeal to the masses expanded. Feeling more assertive than ever, he broke with his mentor Erbakan, and in 2001 founded his own party, AKP, which he described as “democratic conservative” and far from being against secularism.

The rest of the story is well known. AKP won the elections in November 2002 with 34.3 per cent of the votes, and Erdogan became Prime Minister in early 2003. In spite of his newly found moderation, he has regularly challenged the military establishment and the Kemalist President Ahmet Necdet Sezer, and so far come out unscathed. His ambition, detected since the aborted presidential elections of last May, is to simultaneously control the parliament, government and the presidency.

His detractors have systematically tried for the past five years to undermine his reputation and integrity, without success. Next Monday, three experienced actors will enter the stage of the National Assembly, but one only will shine in the limelight. The guess is easy to make. —Dawn/The IPS News Service