Turkey faces crisis

Turkey faces crisis

The prime minister said he would seek national elections on either June 24 or July 1 and officials said the date was likely to be decided on Wednesday. The polls were due to be held by November.

The decision could provide some relief for Turkey's financial markets which have suffered their biggest sell-off in a year over the last two days on fears of instability.

The opposition had been demanding early elections but Erdogan's ruling AK Party is widely expected to win after five years of strong economic growth since it came to power in 2002.

"The people will speak," said a headline in the Sabah daily, which drew on Erdogan's call for the public to elect the president rather than the parliament.

His government vowed to press on with a presidential vote in parliament after the Constitutional Court annulled the first round on Tuesday. It is unlikely to win the necessary two-thirds majority.

An opposition boycott of the presidential vote prompted the move for early general elections because it left the AKP short of the quorum needed for the election of its candidate, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul.

"The parliamentary system has been blocked ... We are urgently going to the people. Our people will make the best decisions," Erdogan told a news conference on Tuesday.

In remarks apparently aimed at the military, he said: "In democracies there is no better way of making warnings (to the government) than by ballot boxes."

The army has ousted four governments since 1960, the last in 1997 when it acted against a cabinet in which Gul served.

Secularists suspect Erdogan and Gul, former Islamists whose wives wear the Muslim headscarf banned from state institutions, of wanting to break the separation of state and religion. They reject the allegation and point to their pro-Western record in office.