Just Any Government at All

Turkey seems to be in the grip of a perpetual crisis. After the army toppled the corrupt, free-spending regime of Premier Adnan Menderes in 1960 and executed him, the military ruled ineffectually for 18 months, then let civilians take over. Durable Ismet Ino-nu became Premier, decided to try to hold the country together amidst the lingering bitterness without curbing parliamentary democracy. Probably no one else could have done it. Inonu, 80, seemed like an embodiment of Turkey's past: born under the Sultanate, he was one of Kemal Ataturk's most dashing revolutionary generals, first became Prime Minister in 1923, served on and off as Premier or President of Turkey for 40 years. Yet last week Inonu was again fighting to save Turkey from new political turmoil.

New Dilemma. Inonu and his People's Republican Party inaugurated overdue reforms, but these did not necessarily make him popular. Bureaucrats were angered by his campaign against waste. Businessmen and big landowners were incensed by new schemes to make them pay taxes. Plain consumers were mad at the attempt to put government monopolies on a profit-making basis, which raised prices. Peasants, who still would rather have new mosques than new schools, hankered for the old days when Menderes built 8,000 village shrines.

Menderes' heirs in the Justice Party kept gaining ground with their strange mixture of aging leaders forever trotting out the ghost of the dead leader and young politicians forever promising that they could run things more efficiently than Inonu. In last month's nationwide municipal elections, Inonu was plainly overconfident. While Justice Party Leader Ragip Gumuspala, 66, campaigned strenuously, covering thousands of miles a week, Inonu loftily limited his politicking to a single 20-minute radio speech. The results gave Inonu's Republicans only 37% of the vote; two smaller parties in Inonu's shaky government coalition were virtually wiped out. The winner was the Justice Party, with 46% of the ballots.

Last week Inonu resigned. His dilemma: neither major party can rule separately, since each lacks a parliamentary majority, and neither wants to rule jointly, since that experiment was tried once before, lasted seven months and accomplished nothing. None of the smaller parties seem eager to join another coalition, either. New national elections? Nobody is enthusiastic over that idea.

Try Again. For the time being, at least, the army was sticking to its pledge of political neutrality, but no one could be sure how long the military would resist the idea of restoring "stability" by staging another takeover. By week's end Turkey's President, General Cemal Gursel, came to Inonu and asked him to form a new Cabinet; conceivably he might succeed, by persuading one of the small parties to join a coalition and picking, up enough defectors elsewhere to scrape up a parliamentary majority. After all, Inonu's immediate aim was not a stable government, but any government at all.

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