Turkey’s first Islamist prime minister Necmettin Erbakan has staged a political comeback at the age of 83 by becoming leader of the small Saadet party.
Erbakan was elected unopposed as president of Saadet (Felicity), which won less than three percent of votes in the last parliamentary elections in 2007 and a little over five percent in last year’s municipal polls.
He became prime minister of a coalition government in 1996 before being forced to resign under pressure from the military – the staunch defenders of Turkey’s secular constitution – after just one year in office.
His Refah (Welfare) party was subsequently banned by the constitutional court in January 1998 and Erbakan was handed a two-year jail term in 2002 on embezzlement charges, although the sentence was later commuted to house arrest.
Erbakan was at one time seen as a mentor of the current Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose Justice and Development Party (AKP) has strong Islamist roots, AFP reported.
