Members of Turkey's new parliament -- dominated by a party with Islamic roots and including pro-Kurdish politicians for the first time in 13 years -- were set to take the oath of office Saturday.
The Justice and Development Party won 341 seats in the 550-member legislature and will form the second consecutive majority government in 20 years. President Ahmet Necdet Sezer was expected to ask Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to form the next government on Monday, the state-run Anatolia news agency said Saturday.
Erdogan's ruling party won 46.6 percent of the votes in July 22 elections, almost 12 percentage points more than in the previous elections.
The main opposition Republican People's Party will have 99 seats. The far right Nationalist Action Party returned to the Parliament with 70 seats, after a five-year absence.
Once the new government is formed, Parliament must choose a new president.
The Nationalist Action party has already pledged to help the government achieve the quorum needed to elect a president. In May, Parliament failed to reach a quorum in a similar vote.
Erdogan had nominated Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, one of his closest allies, for the presidency in April, sparking a backlash from the firmly secular opposition.
Both Erdogan and Gul's past in political Islam raised fears among many Turks that the government was trying to scrap Turkey's secular principles. Erdogan's party has said that it has no secret Islamic agenda and pushed for the country's membership bid in the European Union.
The main opposition party's boycott of the first round of the vote meant that a quorum could not be reached -- and prompted Erdogan to call general elections July 22, four months earlier than scheduled, in an attempt to resolve the impasse.
After the elections, both Gul and party officials signaled his name would be put forward again. But Erdogan was reportedly seeking alternative names to Gul to win backing of the opposition for a smooth presidential election.
Some 26 independents, including 21 pro-Kurdish lawmakers, won seats. The pro-Kurdish lawmakers ran in the election as independents to circumvent a 10-percent vote threshold required for parties to win representation in Parliament.
The Kurdish lawmakers regrouped under the banner of the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party, which seeks more rights for the ethnic minority, marking the first time the group is represented in the legislature since its ouster in 1994 over alleged ties to separatist Kurdish rebels.
For many Kurds, the revival of the Democratic Society Party raises hopes for a new era in their struggle for more rights. But many Turks are afraid of a party suspected of being under the influence of an organization labeled as terrorist by the United States and the European Union and which has fought to carve out a separate Kurdish state.
