Turkish nationalists set to win seats, boost clout

By Gareth Jones

ANKARA, July 19 (Reuters) - With pledges to restrict house sales to foreigners and to hang a jailed Kurdish rebel leader, Turkey's popular Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) has injected a harshly nationalist note into the country's election campaign.

But Turkish voters seem to like the message. Opinion polls show the MHP coming a strong third in Sunday's election, behind the ruling Islamist-rooted AK Party and centre-left but also nationalist-oriented Republican People's Party (CHP).

Set to win up to 100 seats in the 550-seat parliament, the MHP will try, possibly in league with the CHP, to block reforms sought by foreign investors and the European Union and will press for army action against Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq.

But analysts say the party's real importance may lie more in the kind of impact the MHP's fiery rhetoric may have outside parliament, on more impressionable parts of the public in Turkey, where ultra-nationalism often turns to violence.

"They won't be able to invade Iraq or abolish the death penalty ... but I am worried about the kind of anti-West, anti-foreigner signals they can send out," said Ayse Ayata of Ankara's Middle East Technical University.

"The MHP is scary not so much for its wider policies as for the kind of influence it can exert on small communities around Turkey, the kind of people behind the murder of (Turkish Armenian editor) Hrant Dink back in January."

Eighteen people, including the teenage self-confessed gunman, are on trial for the Dink murder in a case many believe may also involve hardline nationalists in the security forces.

Nobody has suggested any MHP link to the Dink case but the murder exposed the power of ideas associated with the party -- such as intolerance of minorities -- among disaffected youth.

Dink had angered nationalists by urging Turkey to own up to its role in the mass killings of ethnic Armenians in the country during World War One -- still virtually a taboo issue here.



FRUSTRATION

But the MHP's appeal extends far beyond angry youths.

"This is a very MHP kind of election. For the first time, they are gaining significant middle-class support. This reflects frustration with the CHP and anger with the AK Party," said Ayata.

Increased Kurdish militant attacks on Turkish security forces and moves to set up an independent Kurdish state in northern Iraq have fuelled Turkish nationalism.

MHP leader Devlet Bahceli has called for the restoration of the death penalty for "terrorists" -- even though he and his party served in a coalition government that abolished capital punishment in 2002 as part of Turkey's EU reform drive.

That government also commuted to life imprisonment a court's death sentence against Kurdish rebel chief Abdullah Ocalan, whom Bahceli says he now wants to see hanged. The MHP, which last time failed to win the 10 percent of the vote needed to get seats in parliament, has a violent past. Its supporters, including its Grey Wolves youth wing, waged running street battles in the 1970s with left-wingers.

But under Bahceli it has built a more respectable image.

"The MHP is not fascist ... though its views are very outdated and inward-looking," said Cengiz Aktar of Istanbul's Bahcesehir University.

The MHP is expected to try to rally public opposition to political reforms and concessions on the vexed Cyprus issue that are deemed vital to keep Turkey's troubled EU bid on track.

Some commentators fear fistfights in parliament when MHP deputies take their seats next to independent MPs seeking more rights for Turkey's large ethnic Kurdish minority.

In a possible sign of the tensions to come, MHP supporters and Kurdish demonstrators clashed this week at an election rally in Dogubeyazit, a town in mainly Kurdish eastern Turkey.