Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan asked the Turkish parliament today to approve early national elections for June 24 and his party began to press for several constitutional changes that would bring it advantages in the coming political battle.

Elections had been scheduled for November 4, but will be held early because Turkey’s highest court on Tuesday annulled a parliamentary vote for president, effectively blocking Mr. Erdogan’s candidate, a close ally with a background in Islamic politics. The ruling placed Mr. Erdogan’s party in a standoff with Turkey’s secular establishment.

“Bringing forward the general election will reduce uncertainty,” said Bulent Arinc, the speaker of parliament and a senior member of Mr. Erdogan’s party, Reuters reported.

In a rousing speech before his party, known by its Turkish initials, AK, Mr. Erdogan struck back at the court and the secular establishment that it represents, calling its decision “a bullet for democracy.”

In a speech on Tuesday night, Mr. Erdogan challenged the secular opposition openly, saying the place that he would prevail was at the ballot box.

His confidence today had not flagged. Part of the time, he seemed to speak directly to the secular opposition party who filed the case to get his candidate blocked.

“Now you’re going to see who’s going to run away and who’s going to remain in the arena,” he said.

His party proposed two constitutional amendments it is hoping to push through parliament before elections begin.

The first would lower the required age for candidates to 25 years. The party’s supporters are overwhelmingly young and its candidates tend to be younger too.

The second initiative is one that would allow the president, the highest secular office in the country, to be chosen by popular vote, taking it out of the hands of the parliament, where the choice is currently made.

“Our wish is to place two ballot boxes before the people,” he said.

Some of the opposition parties are strongly against the initiative, but some are in favor, and Mr. Erdogan would need only a handful of votes outside his party to pass it.

There have been eight early national elections in Turkey since the country became a multi-party system in 1946.

In a largely procedural move, the parliament also set a schedule for a continuation of the presidential vote. Mr. Erdogan’s party knows there is virtually no chance its candidate, Abdullah Gul, the country’s foreign minister, could be confirmed, but the law requires that a constitutional process such as the election of the president must continue once it begins.

“Our ideas, our lifestyles may be different, but we are one nation and one country,” Mr. Erdogan said. “Nobody can overshadow this.”

United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, en route to a conference of Iraq’s neighbors in Egypt, said that “the United States fully supports Turkish democracy and its constitutional processes, and that means that the election, the electoral system and the results of the electoral system and the results of the constitutional process have to be upheld,” Bloomberg reported.

(Published by The New York Times, May 2, 2007)