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Turkey Elects Islamist President
Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, who is described as an "ex-Islamist", has been elected President by a parliamentary vote.
The vote comes hours after Turkey's powerful army Chief of Staff warned he had been watching "centres of evil who systematically try to corrode the secular nature of the Turkish Republic".
Gul's plan to run for the Presidency in April this year triggered a mini-crisis which caused his ruling AK Party (which has Islamist roots) to call an early election. The AK won with a much larger majority, which observers have put down to the party's stewardship of the economy rather than any widespread support for the religious beliefs of its members.
However, many secularists and centrists hoped that Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan would urge Mr Gul to postpone his candidacy in order to soothe fears that the AK was taking the country on a worryingly Islamist route. Mr Gul, however, claims that the AK Party's landslide election victory last month was a plebiscite on his candidacy. To withdraw his nomination, he said, would be to betray the public.
Both Mr Erdogan and Mr Gul are former Islamist activists. The PM served a prison sentence as recently as 1999 for writing a poem praising political Islam, and once described democracy as a "tram" towards a better form of government. As Mayor of the city of Istanbul in 1994, he banned alcohol from city cafés.
Since taking charge of the AK, he has been at pains to stress that the party is a mainstream conservative government; both he and Mr Gul have been at the centre of negotiations on Turkey's entrance to the EU.
Many in Europe's governing elite respect the urbane Mr Gul, who is an economist by profession. Publications which have been strongly supportive of Turkey's membership of the EU, such as Britain's Economist, have stressed the moderate nature of the AK's leadership and praised their economic achievements. Western advocates for Turkey have also supported the AK Party leadership's strategy of facing down Turkey's Generals, whose interference in politics they find profoundly anti-democratic.
Turkey's army has toppled four governments since the 1960s and, despite being a leading member of NATO, is viewed with some suspicion in the West for its human rights record in supressing militant activity in Turkey's Kurdish regions.
The EU warned the Army against intervening in the Presidency row in April.
However, the Turkish Army is not simply jealously clinging to its decades-old influence over Turkey's democracy: Its leaders and supporters believe it has a responsibility to guard "social, democratic and secular Turkey."
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, concluded that there was no such thing as "moderate" Islam and purged the state of all signs of Islamic influence in 1923.
The generals, and even middle-class secularists who would usually oppose intervention by the Army, see the AK Party leadership as introducing, little by little, the signs and symbols of Islam into Turkey's political life. Even the fact that the President-elects wife wears a headscarf is worrying: Under Turkish law, headscarves are forbidden from schools, universities and public buildings.
Hence the friction between the Army and the (ex-)Islamists. The AK Party leadership says that the religious beliefs of its leaders (which are, it must be said, a great deal more moderate than those of some of its supporters) are personal, and do not have any impact on how they run the country. Mr Gul argues that for the past four and a half years, his government has been changing Turkey's laws to comply with European Union standards, not sharia ones. He stressed he agreed with the Turkish Constitution, which enshrines a secular state.
Secularists disagree.
The Presidency is more than a formal position: Turkey's President has the power to block laws. The previous President, Ahmet Necdet Sezer, blocked several of Mr Erdogan's laws. One was the appointment of the head of an Islamic finance group which does not use interest to the top job in Turkey's Central Bank.
Another law blocked by the former President was one which slashed sentences for Islamist preachers found teaching the Koran in unauthorised schools. Sezer said it amounted to a sign of approval for extremists and hardliners.
The AK Party also has a formidable populist streak. Mr Erdogan planned to make adultery illegal in 2004. He tried to soothe western concerns over the sexism of such a law by arguing that unlike a previous Islamist-inspired attempt at introducing an adultery law (in 1996), this one would punish men and women alike. A three-year sentence for "marital infidelity" was touted.
The law was withdrawn under heavy EU pressure, but for many suspicious of the AK Party's long-term agenda, the row was revealing.
With Mr Gul as President and the AK Party high on a whopping electoral victory, what is to stop the government stepping up its Islamist agenda?
Turkey is a complex and divided country. The headscarf-wearing women who crowded the streets to celebrate the AK Party's landslide election victory in July seemed deeply at odds with the image of a modern Turkey the country's EU supporters have been at pains to describe. Many European voters can be assuaged by images of secular, western-dressed Turks at work and at play in one of the nation's major cities: What's to stop these people joining the European Union? went the message.
It is more difficult to work up similar enthusiasm for the legions who supported the AK Party. Many EU nations are having their own troubles with rising Islamist militancy: Voters are unlikely to welcome more.
