Ever since Recep Tayyip Erdogan appeared on the outskirts of political power, the Turkish establishment has tried to keep him out.

Today they stand eager to usher him in, hopeful that he can turn around a crisis in relations with Washington and gain parliamentary approval for a deal to base more than 60,000 US troops here for a war in Iraq.

Mr. Erdogan - who will become prime minister sometime in the next week following by-elections Sunday in the province of Siirt - is expected to ask parliament to pass a once-defeated motion to allow Turkish soil to be used in a US-led war against Iraq. In doing so, he faces the challenge of moving rapidly enough to suit the Bush administration's timetable without alienating constituents who thought he would be the last man to aid the West in a war against a Muslim neighbor.

"There will be an image that [outgoing prime minister] Abdullah Gul rejected the war and so the US replaced him, and that will not be good for Tayyip Erdogan," says Rusen Cakir, a biographer of Erdogan's controversial career. "It will be a shadow over him."

Born in a rough-and-tumble Black Sea village and bursting onto the national stage as a feisty soccer player, Erdogan has fought his way out of the shadows before. Turkey's secular state guardians - the military, courts, and bureaucracy - have explicitly tried to keep him from becoming prime minister. His political career began with the Islamist Welfare Party. Then in 1997, he was convicted of inciting religious hatred at a rally after reading a poem that used the mosque as an allegory for militancy, comparing worshippers to soldiers, minarets to bayonets.

The conviction led to jail time and a prohibition on holding office. Erdogan's popularity only increased. He went on to establish the AK [Justice and Development] Party, emerging from the disbanded Welfare Party as the indisputable leader. As Istanbul's mayor in the mid1990s, he gained Rudy Guiliani style appeal, cleaning up a great city in decline. But when his party won enough votes to form a single-party government in last November's elections, his conviction still barred him from holding office.

Members of parliament, under his unofficial leadership, reversed that ban. Whether they will also reverse their March 1 rejection of a proposal to base thousands of US troops here is the question everyone is asking.

"When I voted for the AK Party in November, I voted for Tayyip Erdogan, and I want him to be our leader," says civil servant Mehmet Yurtsever, as he made his way from Friday prayers at the Zincirli mosque in Ulus, a working class neighborhood. "I want the parliament to vote again, to help the US forces, but that doesn't mean we're voting for war."

Erdogan is already under pressure from different camps: those who urge him to finalize a deal with the US to avoid irreparable damage to Turkey's strategic interests and those who think he should heed the public's overwhelming opposition to war. Turkey stands to lose the chance to play an important role in formulating "regime change" in Iraq, as well as up to $15 billion in grants and loans from the US.

But if Erdogan pursues a second vote too soon - and it fails to pass - his image as the poor man's leader who can move masses will suffer a huge blow.

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