Turkey's ruling AKP wins vote

By Hidir Goktas and Paul de Bendern

ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkey's ruling AK Party won a resounding election victory on Sunday, giving the pro-business, Islamist-rooted party a mandate for reform but risking fresh tensions with the secular elite.

The result is a moral triumph for Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan who called early parliamentary polls after losing a battle with the establishment, including army generals, who did not want his ex-Islamist ally as head of state.

With nearly all votes counted, his party won 47 percent, up some 13 points on 2002, but a more united opposition means it will get around 341 out of 550 seats, slightly fewer than now.

"This is the first time in 52 years that a party in power has increased its votes for a second term," Erdogan told thousands of jubilant supporters outside his party's plush new headquarters in the capital Ankara where fireworks lit the sky.

"We will continue to work with determination to achieve our European Union goal," he said of strained efforts to join the bloc and anchor his country more firmly to the West.

Only two other, secularist, parties crossed the 10 percent threshold into parliament -- the nationalist-minded Republican People's Party (CHP) on 21 percent and the far-right National Movement Party (MHP) on 14 percent.

A score of mainly Kurdish independents also got in, the first Kurds in the assembly since the early 1990s -- prompting wild celebrating in their troubled eastern heartland.

In cities across Turkey Erdogan's fans danced, honked car horns, and waved huge flags with the party emblem, a lightbulb.

The parties had fought over economic reform, Kurdish separatist violence, efforts to join a hesitant EU and religion's place in a country of 74 million people that stretches from the EU in the west to Iran and Iraq in the east.

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Voters seem to have dismissed opposition warnings that the AK Party secretly sought an Iranian-style theocracy, despite mass rallies this year in defense of the rigid state-religion divide in Turkey, one of the Muslim world's few democracies.

"Instinctively, I feel it is too much of a majority. Fear of this religious agenda is so engrained in us, but it may just have been pumped up over the last years," said Elif Ayan, a 31-year-old film maker in Istanbul.

"I am sure they have an agenda but I don't think it is as bad as it is represented."

Erdogan, 53, has presided over an economic boom, record foreign investment, and in a sign of market cheer at his win the lira gained almost 2 percent on the dollar in early Asian trade.

Economists said Turkey's most popular politician could now press on with free-market policies and kick-start stalled EU membership talks, despite disillusionment at joining the bloc.