Victorious party leader attempts to find Prime Minister

Turkish elections landslide triumph for pro-Islamists deals blow to secular establishment and worries Western governments

Turkey's new pro-Islamic party will try today to find a leader who can become Prime Minister after its landslide victory in parliamentary elections on Sunday.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the victorious leader of the AKP, has renounced his militant Islamist past. But he remains banned from holding public office because of a 1998 conviction he received for publicly reciting a fervent poem with religious undertones.

Mr Erdogan refused to name a replacement in the election run-up, wanting to avoid potentially divisive bickering. But he said he would meet aides today to designate a leader. Any name will probably only be a stop-gap because Mr Erdogan will still hold the reins. One of the AKP's first challenges will be to try to overturn the law under which he is banned.

The party leader was quick to assuage fears that he would take Turkey in a more Islamic direction.

"We will not spend our time dizzy with victory. We will build a Turkey where common sense prevails," he said at a celebration at party headquarters. On the sidelines, a party official called on supporters not to shout religious slogans such as "God is Great!".

The Justice and Development Party – which is less than a year old – won a parliamentary majority in Sunday's elections, which saw the political establishment routed over voter rage at corruption and economic mismanagement. The AKP gained more than a third of all votes cast and 363 out of 550 seats. Only one other party, the left-leaning Republican People's Party (CHP), will be represented in the parliament because of a 10 per cent national vote threshold. The outgoing prime minister, Bulent Ecevit, managed just over 1 per cent of the vote.

Mr Ecevit resigned yesterday after suffering the humiliating defeat at the hands of the AKP, who prepared to become the country's first single-party government in 15 years.

The veteran conservative leaders, Tansu Ciller and Mesut Yilmaz, as well as the nationalist chief, Devlet Bahceli, announced they would step down. Their voluntary departure stunned a country where leaders traditionally hang to power until old age.

The Sabah daily called the AKP victory a revolt by Turkey's increasingly impoverished Anatolian heartland. "Politics has never seen such a widespread liquidation operation," it said.

Deniz Baykal, the Republican party leader, said there was no surprise in the results. "Two million people lost their jobs, hundreds of thousands of stores shut down, people's debts increased, and they could no longer look at the future with hope," he said. "There had been great corruption and a collapse of economic and ethical values."

The AKP win is unnerving to Turkey's powerful and secular generals, who in the past forced a pro-Islamic government from power. The AKP has its roots in Turkey's Islamist movement, but it rejects the "Islamist" label and says it is moderate conservative. Mr Erdogan has said he supports the European Union, the International Monetary Fund, and American policy on Iraq.

During a news conference he listed what he saw as the problems of the country, and cited "barriers to the right to education" – an apparent reference to the controversial restriction against wearing Islamic headscarves at Turkish universities. "Our priority will be to lift those barriers and to achieve a modern standard of life," Mr Erdogan said.

He added that his government would be supporting Turkey's long-standing bid to become a member of the European Union. The bloc is due to meet next month to decide whether to give Turkey a date to start accession talks. The United States, which needs Turkey, a Nato ally, as a launching pad for any invasion on neighbouring Iraq, has been pressing Europe to encourage Ankara's application to combat any extremist tendencies.