TURKEY-POLITICS: Confusing Ciller Postpones Partial Elections

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Nadire Mater

ISTANBUL, Nov 22 1994 (IPS) - After pressing for partial mid-term elections for most of the year Turkish prime minister Tansu Ciller Tuesday postponed any attempts to hold polls in 1994 which could have given her a renewed mandate for her coalition government.

However, Junior coalition SHP leader Murat Karayalcin addressing a parliamentary group meeting Tuesday adamantly called for partial elections to be held in December.

“The country is already drawn into an election atmosphere. Suspending the elections might lead to unhealthy developments,” Karayalcin warned his party deputies.

Prime minister Tansu Ciller also addressing her DYP parliamentary deputies in a group meeting justified her contradictory positions with regard to partial elections by saying her postponement was for “the benefit of the country”.

“When we decided to go to partial elections on Dec. 4, this was also for the country’s benefit. Now we are refusing a later date again for the country’s benefit,” Ciller said.

Her contradictory statements regarding the partial elections added to the current political confusion rather than clearing the air, political analysts here agreed.

“Her statements Tuesday contradict with those of yesterday. She is daily losing public trust,” said Yalcin Dogan of the daily ‘Milliyet’ newspaper.

Ciller’s government decided in September to go for partial elections on Dec. 4 for 22 vacant seats in parliament although the constitution obliges partial elections when 23 out of a total 450 seats in the parliament are vacated.

Some 16 of the seats were vacated when the pro-Kurdish DEP was banned and the deputies’ mandates repelled by a constitutional court decision in June. Instead of going to partial elections later than previously agreed on Dec. 4, Ciller on Monday called for an amendment of Article 77 of the constitution and going to general elections in 1995.

Should the parliament amend the article to shorten the elections interval to every four years, partial elections might be legally by-passed and through earlier general elections political stability would be attained Ciller seemed to believe on Monday.

Yet, Ciller, on Tuesday, put forth an ever fresh formula, this time to amend the elections law and to “hold simultaneous local and general elections”. However, without any explicit schedule.