Turks fear Ecevit is losing grip on power

Turkey was lurching into yet another crisis yesterday after the Prime Minister, Bulent Ecevit, was too sick to attend an important monthly meeting with the generals who wield much of the real power.

Fears are growing that Mr Ecevit, who is 77, is so ill that he will have to resign, forcing new elections.

Opinion polls suggest an election now would be won by an Islamist political party led by a former footballer, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. That would not only leave the second largest army in Nato and an important US ally that borders Iraq in the hands of political Islamists, but provoke a dangerous dispute with the secularist army, which wields the real power.

Turkey has been lurching from one panic to another since a crisis of financial confidence last year sent the economy into freefall. The stability of a plan backed by the International Monetary Fund to rescue the economy depends on the leadership of Mr Ecevit, who is holding together a loose coalition of feuding political parties.

The irony is that Mr Ecevit was the man who almost single-handedly caused last year's financial crisis by picking a very public fight with the President on the day the treasury was borrowing massively overnight to service debt.

Mr Ecevit's career in Turkish politics is very long. As prime minister almost three decades ago, he ordered the invasion of Cyprus. He began to make public gaffes a few years ago, at one time telling the astonished victims of a flood they had suffered an earthquake.

Since then, the severity of his ill health has been revealed. He has just been released from hospital where he was treated for a broken rib and a vein infection. But the Turkish press reports that he is suffering from Parkinson's disease and another serious nervous disorder.

He recently held a cabinet meeting at his hospital bed. But the National Security Council meeting, with the generals, that he missed yesterday was much more important. Power in Turkey is, at best, shared between the army and the government, and defence and the Kurdish issue remain the preserve of the military command.

If the Islamists came to power, there would be no cosy cohabitation with the generals. The Turkish army regards itself as the guardian of the secularist beliefs of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey. The first Islamist government was forced out of power in the Nineties, when the army threatened a coup and sent a few tanks on street maneouvres to reinforce the point.

But waiting in the wings behind the ailing Mr Ecevit is Mr Erdogan, the acceptable face of Turkish Islamism. A former football star, he was a hugely popular mayor of Istanbul, cleaning up corruption and pushing through municipal projects. He has only recently emerged from a jail term he received for publicly reciting a poem judged to be Islamist, despite appearing in school books.

Mr Erdogan's version of Islamic policies is more diluted than those of the former Islamist prime minister Necmettin Erbakan, but Turkish secularists have always viewed the populist as the man to fear. And the possibility of his coming to power will not be viewed with any more relish by Turkey's Western allies.