PM's illness puts Turkey on the brink of collapse Â

The coalition government in Turkey held a summit meeting in a hospital ward yesterday as the increasingly frail Prime Minister, Bulent Ecevit, faced growing calls to step down due to ill health.

The country's political and economic future may well hang on Mr Ecevit's health, and his illness has set alarm bells ringing in Ankara and abroad.

Newspapers have speculated for several months that Mr Ecevit suffers from a disease of the nervous system that also impairs his motor skills. He has appeared shaky and made several public blunders.

But the ruling elite is desperate to keep Mr Ecevit, a staunch secularist, in power because he has no natural successor and there are fears that his departure would lead to a return to power for Islamists.

"Nothing is clear after Ecevit," said a commentator in the Milliyet daily, Hasan Cemal. "The entire political structure could collapse."

The 76-year-old veteran leader was admitted to the hospital on Friday – the second time in 10 days. He is being treated for an infection in his leg and a cracked rib sustained in a fall, apparently off a chair.

As the country struggles to climb out of its worst recession since the Second World War, the sight of Mr Ecevit inching his way up hospital steps sent the Turkish currency to its lowest point since last autumn, and the stock market plummeted.

The leaders of the three-party coalition met at the Ankara Baskent hospital where Mr Ecevit is being treated. They issued a statement afterwards ruling out an early election. "An end to the debate about early elections would be good for the country and the economy," they said.

But political opponents demanded medical proof that Mr Ecevit was fit to govern.

"We want the results of a full medical inquiry to be disclosed to the public," said the leader of the opposition True Path Party, Tansu Ciller, in the daily newspaper, Hurriyet.

Mr Ecevit's resignation would almost certainly upset the delicate left-right coalition, leading to early elections, and could derail an economic rescue plan backed by the International Monetary Fund.

Early elections are a nightmarish prospect for Ankara's strictly secularist establishment and military – a powerful force behind the scenes – as all opinion polls indicate voters would overwhelmingly return the pro-Islamist Justice and Development Party to power.

None of the three current ruling parties looks likely to even cross the 10 per cent threshold needed to win seats in parliament. Economic hardship, the tough IMF programme and politics as usual have not been popular.

Mr Ecevit was resurrected as a viable political alternative after the former Islamist prime minister Necmettin Erbakan was forced out of office in a "soft coup" in 1997.

A pro-labour leftist in the 1970s, he has led Turkey's IMF-backed economic recovery plan since taking office in 1999. His brand of old-school secularism does not resonate as much with his coalition partners, Devlet Bahceli of the far-right Nationalist Action Party, and Mesut Yilmaz of the liberal Motherland Party, who are more concerned not to alienate their religious and conservative constituencies. Neither is there an heir apparent in his Democratic Left Party, which Mr Ecevit and his wife, Rahsan, have led with an iron fist for the best part of three decades.

Public opinion polls show the Islamist leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan would almost certainly lead if early elections were to be held this year. Mr Erdogan, former mayor of Istanbul, was jailed for 10 months in 1998 on sedition charges. He now says he advocates a model of Islamic democracy. But the generals are deeply sceptical of Mr Erdogan's rhetoric and are unlikely to allow the party back in power.