Turkey's PM seeks early polls

By Hidir Goktas and Gareth Jones

ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said on Tuesday his Islamist-rooted government would seek early national elections on either June 24 or July 1 to resolve a standoff with the country's secular elite.

Erdogan's decision set the stage for a test of wills at the polls with the secularists, including the military that had threatened to intervene in the standoff over a presidential vote and sees itself as the guarantor of Turkey's secular system.

The secularist opposition has been demanding early national elections but Erdogan's ruling AK Party, which has presided over nearly five years of robust economic growth, is widely expected to win. The standoff has rattled Turkey's financial markets.

The opposition's boycott of the presidential vote in parliament prompted Erdogan to seek early national elections because it left the AK Party short of the required quorum to get its candidate, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, elected.

"The parliamentary system has been blocked... We are urgently going to the people. Our people will make the best decisions," Erdogan told a televised news conference. Officials said the election date was likely to be decided on Wednesday.

In remarks apparently aimed at the military -- his government has shown unprecedented defiance of the generals -- he said: "In democracies there is no better way of making warnings (to the government) than ballot boxes."

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

Erdogan, elected after years of weak coalition governments and corruption, also raised the stakes by saying he wanted to see the president elected in future by voters instead of parliament -- a clear effort to identify with the people.