ANKARA, Sun Mar 29, (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - Turks began voting on Sunday in local elections likely to give Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan's ruling AK Party a fresh mandate to press on with political and economic reforms in the European Union candidate.
Voters in the predominantly Muslim country of 72 million people elect mayors and municipal and provincial assemblies, but the vote is seen more as a referendum on the popular Erdogan.
Four people were killed and more than fifty wounded in election violence in the mainly Kurdish southeast of Turkey, security and hospital sources said.
The Islamist-rooted AK Party has won three straight elections since it first crushed the secularist opposition in 2002. Most opinion polls show it winning the local polls with about 40 percent of the vote despite record unemployment and an economy hit by the global economic crisis after years of unprecedented domestic growth and record foreign investment.
Erdogan has pledged to reform the 1982 military-drafted constitution and change the way the Constitutional Court works, steps which would remove some obstacles to EU membership but threaten to revive tensions with secularists who accuse him of pursuing an Islamist agenda. Erdogan denies this.
"Our people's decision will emerge today and all political parties will respect this," Erdogan said after casting his vote.
The AK Party, rooted in political Islam but also embracing nationalists and center-right elements, was nearly closed down by the Constitutional Court for Islamist activities in a 2008 case that rattled financial markets and deeply polarized Turkey.
The IMF and Turkey have been in talks for months on a deal markets say is key to shielding the $750 billion economy from the global crisis. Markets expect Erdogan to complete those talks after Sunday's vote.
AK LOOK FOR KURDISH GAINS
Erdogan, a former mayor of Istanbul, hopes to wrest the mainly Kurdish southeast from pro-Kurdish parties in what might prove a historic step toward solving a conflict weighing heavily on the country's economic and political development.
"I voted for the AK Party because they are the best for the country and best for the economy. Unemployment is very high here and there is a very young population and we need jobs and development," said Veysel Kaya, 27, who runs a dried food store in Diyarbakir, the biggest city in the southeast.
Turkey's unemployment rate hit an all-time high of 13.6 percent in the November to January period.
In an interview on Friday, Erdogan said he would consider it a "failure" if his party won less in the provincial assemblies vote than the 47 percent it won in a 2007 general vote.
Critics accuse Erdogan of having lost his reformist spirit since Turkey won EU accession talks in 2005 and say he is growing autocratic.
"I have nothing against the AK Party, but I will vote for the (main opposition party) CHP this time because I think we need change," said Mehmet Demir, a civil servant, voting at a school in Ankara.
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