The celebrations will be short for Turkey's Justice and Development Party (AKP), the winner of the Nov. 3 parliamentary elections. Not only does the AKP inherit an anemic economy, weakened by corruption, but its Islamic roots raise fears of military intervention in national politics. AKP leaders have tried to assuage concerns that their party is a threat to Turkey's secular history, but the doubts themselves complicate the already difficult task of governing.
The AKP capitalized on disgust at the government's ineptitude. Turkey is experiencing its worst economic crisis since the end of World War II. The economy shrank 9.4 percent last year and 2 million people lost their jobs. Voters responded by handing the AKP 363 seats in the 550-member Parliament -- the first one-party majority in 15 years -- and sending Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit's party into political oblivion.
The AKP's leader, Mr. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the popular former mayor of Istanbul, would normally be slated to become prime minister. But the constitution mandates that the prime minister be a member of Parliament, and Mr. Erdogan was barred from the assembly after being convicted in 1998 of inciting religious hatred. His crime was reading a poem to Islamist businessmen that declared, "The minarets are our bayonets, the domes our helmets and the mosques our barracks."