BY BOBBIS MISAILIDES
ATHENS, Greece - Instability. That is the watchword in Turkey since the December 24 elections in that country.
Necmettin Erbakan's Welfare Party (Refah) received the largest vote - 21.3 percent - and captured 158 of the total 550 seats in parliament. This upset registered widespread resentment among working people against the austerity measures of the other major capitalist parties that have been in government over the last decade.
The vote for Refah, described in the big-business media as the party of "Islamic fundamentalism," prompted worried comments by ruling-class spokespeople from Bonn to Washington.
After a similar development in Algeria four years ago, the army there annulled the election results and declared martial law with the backing of Paris, setting the stage for a bloody civil war that has claimed the lives of more than 40,000 people.
None of the Turkish capitalist parties received substantial enough votes to form the kind of stable government Ankara needs for the rulers there to press their austerity drive against working people, as well as continue the more than a decade-long war against Turkey's Kurdish population.
Prime minister Tansu Ciller's True Path Party (DYP) received 19.48 percent of the vote and 135 seats. Ciller resigned after the elections but announced she will try to form a governing coalition.
She is courting the major conservative opposition group, the Motherland Party (ANAP) led by Mesut Yilmaz, which came in second with 19.69 percent but won three seats less than Ciller's party. The coalition will have to include a third bourgeois party, probably the social democrats.
The two social-democratic parties, Bulent Ecevit's party of the Democratic Left and Deniz Baykal's People's Republican Party (CHP), won 75 and 50 seats respec tively.
The fascist Nationalist Action Party, which held 17 seats in the previous parliament, barely exceeded 8 percent of the vote, short of the 10 percent needed to be represented in the new legislature.
All these parties are in basic agreement on the need to continue the bosses' attacks on the wages and living conditions of working people. But in face of determined labor resistance the rulers and their parties have been divided over how far to push their austerity drive dictated by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the imperialists of Washington, Bonn, and Tokyo.
The bosses' assault intensified last year after the 1994 plunge of Turkey's economy into its deepest recession in decades. Gross Domestic Product dropped by 8.6 percent while the Turkish lira was sharply devalued. In 1995 inflation ran at over 80 percent and Ankara's foreign debt jumped to nearly $74 billion.
The current government crisis was produced by Turkey's longest nationwide strike actions in more than 15 years. Hundreds of thousands of workers in major industries, as well as civil service employees, walked out September 20. The workers made wage gains through their strikes, which lasted over a month and disrupted the employers' plans.
Faced with this fightback by working people, Ciller resigned as prime minister for the first time, following the withdrawal of the social-democratic CHP from the governing coalition.
During the strike, Ebarkan's, Yilmaz's and Ecevit's opposition parties gave lip service to the demands of the workers, calling for a "more fair" settlement than the one offered by Ciller's regime.
The "shock therapy" austerity measures proposed by Ciller's government included privatization of unprofitable state-owned businesses, mass layoffs, and cuts in wages and social services. Unable to form a new government after the break-up of the governing coalition, Ciller was forced to call early elections.
On December 13, with Germany's rulers in the lead, the European Parliament decided to accept Ankara's application to join the customs union. The customs union would harmonize tariff rates between Turkey and the European Union. The EU accounts for 50 percent of Turkey's exports and imports and the country is heavily dependent on trade with Germany.
Ciller's DYP, the ANAP, and the CHP gave strong support to Turkey's entry into the EU. Ecevit, of the Democratic Left party, called for the "renegotiation of the terms of the agreement" so that "they will not undermine Turkey's national independence."
Refah party leaders have stated they oppose Turkey's integration in the EU. Instead the Welfare Party has called for an "Islamic common market from Kazakstan to Morocco." Refah uses radical populist demagogy to further its stated goal to establish an "Islamic Republic." It also demands that Turkey pull out of NATO. It has opposed imperialist intervention in Iraq and has called for the removal of U.S. and all foreign military bases from Turkey and the whole region. In the past it has also been against the Ciller government's privatization campaign.
After the elections, Refah vice-president Abdulah Gul stated that his party "has no intention of separating and isolating Turkey from the West. We want to develop our relations with Europe." Gul promised the imperialist investors that a Refah government will pay off Turkey's foreign debt as well as continue the privatization campaign.
Before the elections Erbakan had promised to "tear up" the EU agreement. But he quickly changed his tune, stating that "we are not against the customs union. We are against the ... views of the agreement."