Turkey's ruling AKP wins election decisively

ANKARA, July 22 (Reuters) Turkey's ruling Islamist-rooted AK Party won 51.6 percent of the vote in a decisive national election victory today after nearly a quarter of votes had been counted, according to private broadcaster CNN Turk.

Two other parties crossed the 10 per cent threshold to enter parliament, with the leftist CHP winning 15.2 per cent and the ultra-nationalist MHP on 13.7 per cent, it said.

These figures would give the pro-business centre-right AK Party a victory several percentage points higher than opinion polls had predicted.

A senior party official declared victory, saying it would win enough seats to form a single-party government for a second five-year term.

Polls closed an hour earlier in eastern Turkey where the Republican People's Party (CHP) and far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) are relatively weak, so the early figures might not be entirely representative of the final results.

Electoral commission officials estimated turnout at around 80 percent in a country of 74 million people where voting is compulsory.

If both the CHP and MHP clear Turkey's 10 per cent hurdle to enter parliament, as the figures indicated, it was unclear if the AKP would end up with a bigger majority of seats, despite winning some 15 percentage points more than in 2002.

Erdogan, 53, Turkey's most popular politician, called the poll months early after the secular elite, including the powerful army, stopped him appointing a fellow ex-Islamist, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, as president.

Secularists say the AK Party wants to undermine Turkey's strict separation of religion and state, and although the ruling party denies this, the warning struck a chord with some voters.

Turkey is one of the Muslim world's few democracies.

Erdogan, who denies any Islamist agenda, has presided over strong economic growth and falling inflation since his party swept to power in 2002 on the back of a financial crisis.

He has vowed more economic, social and political reforms needed to join the European Union despite scepticism over whether the bloc will ever let Turkey join.

''The AK Party has really helped the poor of this country.

They distribute food, coal. They give money for our daughters to go to school,'' said Huseyin Yilmaz, 34, an unemployed man living in a shanty town on the edge of the capital Ankara.

Some independent, mostly pro-Kurdish candidates, are also tipped to win seats in the 550-member parliament.

Turkish security forces have been battling PKK Kurdish rebels since 1984 in a conflict that has cost more than 30,000 lives.

Violent clashes have increased over the past year.

Turkey's next government will have to decide whether to send the army into northern Iraq to crush PKK rebels based there, a move that is increasingly worrying the United States.

Nationalists are also sceptical about Turkey's EU bid.

Reuters RJ RN2235